


What the Night Brought

by LucyLovecraft



Series: Night & Shadow [2]
Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Fantasy, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Gothic, Healing, Horror, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Multi, OT3, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2019-08-05 13:45:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16368731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyLovecraft/pseuds/LucyLovecraft
Summary: After the events ofOgniem i mieczem, Jan and Helena live together in rebuilt Rozłogi, untroubled by the violent past—until Jurko Bohun returns. But though Bohun brings horror and bloodshed in his wake, it may be that he is no longer the greatest threat to their peace and happiness.Warnings for mentions of/references to rape and underage. Nothing explicit or descriptive, but the subtext is very much there.





	1. The First Frost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the rebellion brought peace, and Helena and Jan's lives together are ones of grateful bliss. But memories of the past still haunt them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have abandoned both canon and history. A list of things that are non-canon in this AU:  
> 
> 
>   * The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth hasn’t lost control of the lands around Łubnie and, most specifically, Rozłogi. But the rebellion was otherwise successful, for a historical value of successful. Jeremi is probably 60% dead, and 100% absent.
>   * Canon epilogue? What canon epilogue? This is the epilogue.
>   * Jan and Helena haven’t had kids yet. *handwaving*
>   * Rzędzian has stayed with Jan and Helena.
>   * I know the peasants cut down the cherry trees at Rozłogi and burned them but I have decided to ignore that because fuck that also this is now an anime
>   * Some people aren’t as dead as they should be. :)
> 


“I was jealous; therefore I loved.”  
― Jack London, _The Sea Wolf_

 

  
  
Early spring had come, winter and summer warring for possession of the earth. All was beautiful and brutal, as any struggle to bring forth life must be. White drifts gave way underfoot to sucking mud. Ice cracked and groaned in the rivers. Shoals of snowdrops lapped white at the edges of forests. And in the forests lay winter’s ancient snows, making their fastness in the shadows beneath the boughs.  
  
Amongst this chaos stood rebuilt Rozłogi, a crossroads between what was and what had been, smelling of new timber and ancient stone. It was a place that marked a borderland, belonging to both sides, and to neither.  
  
It was a home to those whose happiness had been made sweeter by sorrows. If the shadows of the past still touched the lives of those who dwelt there, the darkness did not overcome the light.  
  
Yet the night still harboured shadows, and their dreams were not always peaceful.  
  
On one such night, Jan Skrzetuski won his way back to waking. Even on the edges of consciousness, he felt his body in a familiar bed, and the cry of fear rising in his throat melted away without a sound. Instead he sighed, comforted by the creak of the mattress as his weight shifted, and he opened his eyes to a world of silver light and blue shadow.  
  
Jan’s first, drowsy thought was that the drapes should have been closed. Though he recalled closing them, the chamber was now chill and bright with moonlight. Troubled, he put a hand out to find Helena’s shoulder. But she was not there.  
  
Old fears stirred in shallow graves, and he sat bolt upright.  
  
Fear fled as swiftly as it had come: Helena stood before the open drapes, a slim statue of jet and alabaster, gazing out into the night.  
  
_Thank God._  
  
He bade his heart be still. Watching her, one with the otherworldly silence of deep night, the last remnants of nightmare faded.  
  
She did not turn to him as he approached. Yet at the sound of his footfalls Helena shifted, so that when he put her arms about her she fit herself against the familiar curve of his body.  
  
They stood together, looking out over Rozłogi. The tops of the cherry trees showed as a pale mist beyond the walls, but winter had struck with frost under cover of night. Now the first blossoms were falling like snow, flickering in the moonlight.  
  
Jan tucked the edges of Helena’s shawl more closely about her, bending to kiss where her heavy braid exposed the column of her neck.  
  
“You look like Diana, standing here.”  
  
“Not a ghost?”  
  
“Never,” Jan told her. “God has ordained that no unquiet spirit could ever be as beautiful as Helena, and thus are counterfeiting monsters to be discerned from mortal beauties.”  
  
“Such sweet nonsense.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “You sound like Pan Zagloba.”  
  
“Nonsense? And what of you, Halszka? And are you up watching for those ghosts we hear so much of?”  
  
He bent to kiss the crown of her head, breathing in the warm scent of her hair.  
  
“No,” she answered, more seriously than he had asked. “I do not believe there are ghosts here.” Helena studied the silvered thatch roofs, and the jagged forest beyond. “Rozłogi doesn’t feel haunted,” she said. “It never has. It feels like home.”  
  
“It does feel like home,” Jan agreed. But he knew that, for him, it was only thus because she felt so.  
  
  
It had been the first thing they did together, rebuilding the home that war (that _he_ ) had taken from her.  
  
“Rozłogi?” Jan had asked in surprise. Of all the places they might have chosen, he had not expected that. He had thought she wished to leave the ashes of memory undisturbed.  
  
But as he looked into her anxious face, it came to him that he should have foreseen this. After all, he had heard her speak of her youth there so often. Those stories had always seemed strangely bare. Her aunt and cousins passed through like pale shades; only _he_ seemed to live, coloured by her fear. No, Jan realised, in a moment of sudden clarity: the only life in Rozłogi was Rozłogi itself, each detail as lovingly and vividly painted as a cathedral.  
  
In truth, Jan had hardly connected the Rozłogi of Helena’s stories with its reality. To Helena, Rozłogi’s walls contained a kingdom, full of wonders familiar and sacred, ringed round with a forest dark with the magics of fairy tale.  
  
He would never have dreamed of living in the Rozłogi he had seen. But that was a different world from the Rozłogi she had known.  
  
“And I miss the cherry blossoms,” she explained slowly, a woken dreamer sharing an uncertain dream. “I remember walking through the orchards with my father. I must have been very little, because I had to reach up to hold his hand. But every spring I saw the blossoms, and remembered that he’d been there with me, once. It would be hard—”  
  
Helena stopped, head bowed beneath the weight of the past.  
  
“It would be very hard,” she said at last, “if everything I have left of those days were gone.”  
  
“I had thought you would not wish to return,” Jan said, taking her hand. He bent his head, searching her face, and she raised her gaze to meet his. Candlelight darkened the darker circles that had spread beneath her eyes.  
  
“I _dream_ of Rozłogi, Jan. It was my home. It feels as though I should not leave it dead and empty.” Helena lay her hands on his shoulders, steadying them both by that familiar gesture. Yet her voice still quavered as she said: “It breaks my heart to think of it so.”  
  
“Oh, Halszka,” he murmured, touching her pale cheek. “Is this what has been troubling you?”  
  
“No. Or if it was, it was only last night that I knew.” His wife frowned. “Last night, when I dreamt of the cherry trees. It seemed… Then understood why I’d—why I couldn’t think of anywhere else, even though your lands are so beautiful.”  
  
Her hand clasped his, fine-boned as a bird’s, holding tight in her need for him to understand.  
  
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, Jan, I don’t—”  
  
“Helena?” he interrupted gently. She seemed like a bird in truth, about to take wing.  
  
Looking into her troubled eyes, Jan found certainty.  
  
“If that is what you want, then you shall have cherry blossoms in spring,” he told her, taking holding her two hands in his own. “You shall have your own Rozłogi, if that is where you will be happiest.”  
  
“Thank you,” she breathed, and her soft smile brought springtime to his heart.  
  
“It shall be as my queen wishes, as in all things,” he had said, taking a courtly knee to make her smile.  
  
“And you shall have sweet cherries in summer, he said, kissing her hand. “And when autumn and winter come,” he said, showering her hand with more kisses as she began to laugh, “I will dress you in blossom-soft silks and furs, so you shall always think it spring.”  
  
She sat herself on his knee, putting her arms about his neck, head resting in the angle of his shoulder.  
  
“Oh Jan, I had not known until now how much I wanted to go back. But now…” She nestled more closely against him. “How I love you.”  
  
“And I you.” Jan cradled her against him, the weight of her familiar and beloved.  
  
She sighed, breath warm on his skin.  
  
“I am so very happy, Jan,” she said quietly.  
  
“That is all I could ask, love.”  
  
Then he felt the light brush her lips, and he smiled as he shivered.  
  
“All?” Helena had asked, and kissed his neck again.  
  
“All.”  
  
“Hmm. But perhaps _I_ am not yet happy.”  
  
“What—” he shifted as she began to kiss up the line of his throat, “what else might my dear wife desire?”  
  
“I,” she said, “find I very much desire my husband.”  
  
Jan pulled her closer, feeling the yielding softness of her body through her clothes.  
  
“It shall be as my lady commands: we shall betake ourselves to bed,” he said, lifting her in his arms as he rose, “and then we shall see to your kingdom.”  
  
  
Jan Skrzetuski had been as good as his word, though their new home had been long in the rebuilding. And new it was—not one charred timber remained of the old home and its old sorrows. Those sorrows were not forgotten, though. Before anything else, Jan had ordered the defensive ditch depended, piling the earth within the walls to raise the ground within. Behind that double palisade was a palace fit for his queen: two-storied, with great, shining glass windows, and painted flowers on the eaves.  
  
Rozłogi of the wolves, they had called it: a savage name for a savage place. Jan had once sworn to himself to take Helena away from Rozłogi forever, and never thought to return. Yet the new Rozłogi was so unlike the old that he felt his oath fulfilled.  
  
Helena was happy: she smiled in her sleep, and her footfalls were sure and certain. The Steppe stars had fallen back into her eyes, and winds that would have chilled a daughter of settled lands only kissed roses into her cheeks.  
  
But Rozłogi’s flowers had roots in old ashes. Though it was no longer savage, wildness rose from the dark earth like mist, nourished by the blood that had spilled there. Yet that, too, was right. Jan and Helena had grown up in the borderlands, and the settled heart of the Commonwealth, for all its peace and beauty, felt as artificial as a garden. Fire and war had marked this part of the world, as it had marked their lives. They could not live in a land that did not know them.  
  
If humankind had its memories, the land had its own ways of remembering.  
  
Even when the charred ruins were cleared away and new buildings raised, the peasantry whispered of ghosts and revenants. Their servants were forever seeing spirits in the linen closets and goblins in the cellars. Every half-glimpsed dog at midnight was a werewolf, every scrap of mist a spectre.  
  
The latest apparition had been a ghostly rider who had appeared to the watchman three nights ago, clattering up to the gate on a horse of shadow, then riding away away on the wings of the wind, back towards the old burial mounds.  
  
Jan had asked the watchman why, if the rider was from the mounds (as the old man had darkly assured his listeners) the ghost had bothered to stop at all.  
  
“Do you suppose he’d lost his way?” Jan pressed, trying not to laugh at the servant’s ludicrously grim expression. “Did he perhaps come to ask for directions?”  
  
_My God,_ Jan had thought, giddy gratitude welling up about his heart, _how good a life it is, when the only a thing to disturb a night’s watch are imagined ghosts._  
  
Now, standing in the light of the freshly waxing moon, Jan smiled at the memory.  
  
“Are you thinking of our ghostly rider?” he asked Helena, and was shocked by her response.  
  
“But what if… what if it was true?” she said, clearly only half believing, and all the more unhappy for her uncertainty.  
  
Helena’s voice was almost a whisper: “What if it was Mikolai? It… if it was any of my cousins, it would be Mikolai. He was always the finest rider of them—of any of them—apart from _him_.”  
  
Jan held her closer, making his arms a shelter, _willing_ away the tension he felt wringing her body.  
  
He cursed himself for a fool: he had no ghosts here, but Helena did.  
  
“We will have masses said for your cousin’s soul,” he said. “For all their souls.”  
  
She nodded, comforted as much by his voice as his words.  
  
“I’m being foolish!” Helena muttered.  
  
“No, love.”  
  
“Jan, I do not think it could be one of my family. I think I would know, somehow, if they were unhappy.”  
  
“I do not think your kinsfolk would haunt us, either,” Jan said, kissing her temple. “I believe they would be... they would be glad to know that you had not forgotten them, and had reclaimed this place. No, if any were to haunt us, it would be—”  
  
But no, he must not finish that thought.  
  
“Jan?”  
  
“It was mere foolishness, Helena.”  
  
“Yet it has upset you. Or you fear it will upset me. Or both.”  
  
“Both,” he said. “It was some ill caprice of the night that put it in my mind.”  
  
“Will you not tell me?”  
  
“I thought…” How he wished he had not spoken at all. “My thought was that only Bohun would haunt us here.”  
  
Helena glanced up sharply: “Bohun? No! But he is not dead! Or—wait, what have you heard?”  
  
“Nothing, nothing! No word at all. I should have said that at the first, and I am sorry, love. Forgive me, I beg. No, I have not heard that he is dead.”  
  
Helena’s arms tightened about him, hands tightly linked behind his back.  
  
“But you are right,” she said softly, “if any were to haunt us, it would be he.”  
  
They stood in silence, rebuilding the walls between past and present.  
  
_He is gone. Those times are over. We are home._  
  
At last, they sighed—almost at the same time—and smiled.  
  
Rozłogi was at peace, sleeping beneath a haloed moon.  
  
Then the midnight stillness shattered: a wolf’s howl rose to the moon, carrying lonely and wild through the chill air.  
  
Helena let out her breath in an unhappy gasp.  
  
After the rebellion, wolves had ruled Rozłogi. In those times, as it had been said, wolves had prowled the villages, and people wandered howling in the woods. Maneaters as they had become, it had been a second war to hunt them down and drive them out at last.  
  
Now, this lone wolf seemed an omen, howling out of the bloody past.  
  
Jan tensed and held Helena closer, raising his head as though he might scent the unknown danger he sensed on the still air.  
  
The wolf howled again. He felt Helena’s fists bunch the fabric of his shirt.  
  
“But it’s almost spring!” she exclaimed bitterly. “If the packs have returned, we’re sure to lose lamb, at least!”  
  
They listened in dread for the sound of an answering pack.  
  
No answer came.  
  
The minutes dragged on, but there came no new sound to break the midnight peace. Moment by moment, they both began to relax.  
  
“He is alone,” Helena said.  
  
“God send that it is so.”  
  
“I’m sure of it.”  
  
Looking down at her, Jan was surprised to see her jaw set, as though daring any wolf to come onto her lands to contradict her.  
  
“Are you so sure, my Diana?” Jan asked.  
  
Helena ducked her head, but held her ground: “At this time of year, Jan? In these woods? After such a winter?”  
  
Jan raised his eyebrows.  
  
“What?” she asked, a touch of defiance in her voice. “While you were at court in Łubnie for all those years, learning to dance and write courtly letters to courtly girls, where do you think I was?”  
  
He cocked his head, nonplussed.  
  
She smiled at him then, rising on her toes to kiss him.  
  
“Why, I was at Rozłogi of the wolves, of course. Where else would I be?”  
  
“Well,” Jan said. Then, again: “Well.”  
  
She kissed him again: “So it was only one wolf.”  
  
“One wolf is no great trouble. Certainly not one worth losing any more sleep over.”  
  
And so they went back to bed, their sleep undisturbed by ghosts or howling wolves. If the past came to trouble them in the night, they woke to find themselves safe in each other’s arms and slipped back into sleep, and so found better dreamings.  
  
It was their last night of such sleep in Rozłogi.  
  
The next morning they were woken by shouts and alarms. A shocked and shaking Rzędzian burst into their room, so pale that he could have been a ghost himself. For once the young man could say nothing, but merely tugged at Jan’s sleeve until he had thrown on a mantle and come running to the gate.  
  
Faces turned to Jan as he passed, silent and corpselike.  
  
An awful sense of foreboding grew on him, weighing down each step. It had no source in the pallid dawn, nor the silence of the men. The evil was his: a doom long carried within him, opening, unfolding, beginning to work.  
  
Coming to the foot of the watchman’s post, Jan focused on climbing one rung of the ladder, then another. To think of the top was unthinkable. He could not have reached it, had he thought about it. Yet reach it he did. He turned to the watchman. The man stood, pale and trembling, flinching back from Jan’s eyes.  
  
Jan heard his confessions and protestations, but they did not seem human language. He heard them, but they did not matter.  
  
The icy wood of the wall was bitter cold under Jan’s bare hands, but he could not feel it. Though his breath fogged the air, he could not fill his lungs. He was dizzy with unreality, and yet it was all too real.  
  
Looking down, Jan saw a man lying crumpled in the icy mud before the gate. Blood pooled black around a unnaturally bent leg, and streaked the frosted earth behind him where he had crawled.  
  
Jan knew.  
  
He knew before the gate had opened. He knew, even as he ran, boots crunching on the frosted ground.  
  
Yet he had to be sure, to satisfy himself that fortune had still this last cruel trick to play on Helena and on himself. But when he pushed back the dark hair and saw the fierce, handsome face, Jan could not even find it in his heart to be angry at fate. He had expected this. It was the curse of his past mercies, finding them out at last, as he had always known it would.  
  
It was as the servants said: Rozłogi was a place of ghosts, and Jurko Bohun had returned to haunt them. 


	2. Revenant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jan confronts his past face-to-face, and asks it why it has returned.  
> The mysteries of the previous night—how Bohun came to Rozłogi, and why—begin to be teased open, but Jan can't believe all the answers he hears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Jan has a lot of PTSD and guilt to work through. Warnings for war flashbacks.

Washed and bandaged, Jurko Bohun lay pale against the linen bedsheets. Nothing had woken him, not even the setting of his leg. But for one moan as his bones grated together under Rzędzian’s unloving hands, the Cossack might have been dead.

Jan had never imagined that Jurko Bohun could ever lie so still. The room was utterly silent. And in that silence Jan Skrzetuski stood vigil as his world ended around him in quiet cataclysm.

Bohun had returned to Rozłogi. As inevitable as it had seemed, the cruel reality of it jarred against Jan’s every indrawn breath.

 _Things have changed,_ Jan told himself, willing the thought to feel true. Bohun was a ghost from the past, an echo of another Rozłogi and another life that had ended in blood and flame. ~~~~

_Jan remembered the first time he’d crossed the threshold of the Kurcewiczes’ great house. Rozłogi-that-was had been all primitive savagery and barbaric splendor. As he’d gazed about, dazzled by violent beauty, Jan’s mind returned to the image of the dark young Cossack who had challenged him on the road._

_“A whirlwind,” Jan thought, seeing again Bohun’s flashing teeth and straight-backed grace, “ready for anything.”_

_“But then,” —he had grinned, pulse quickening—“so am I.”_

Had Helena not been by Jan’s side, lighting his heart with love, Jan would surely have challenged Bohun then and there.

 _What foolish pride_ _to have desired a man’s death so lightly! And with what provocation? An insolent glance?_

Yet how different things might have been, had he fought Bohun that day.

 _If only I had known,_ Jan thought, lifting his eyes towards heaven. If he had known, there would have been no brave challenges, no joy in sparking steel. Jan would have chased that damned soul to the gates of Hell itself and beyond. He would have done anything, if Helena might have been spared.

Yet how could he have known? And even had he been told, could the young lieutenant who’d ridden by Helena’s side that day have ever believed what horrors the future held?

These were familiar demons.

Jan Skrzetuski was a soldier: each morning he woke to the ache of regrets like old wounds. For himself, he could have borne it. But on dark nights he woke to Helena’s nightmares. Jan would hold her in his arms, begging her to wake while she screamed, imploring Bohun to spare her family, to spare Jan, to spare her, screaming for him to _stop_.

 _I failed her_. The thought was a rusted blade, long buried in his breast. _Oceans of blood, and all her pain; and God—oh merciful Christ—was that the price of glory? Did her tears buy Zbaraż?_

He could not let his thoughts tread this path: madness lay at its end.

Helena did not blame him. She never had.

These were phantoms from another life, and he must live this present one or despair, and that last he could never do. He would not let past sorrow poison the present. He _must_ not. Their lives had changed, and the past was not a path one could tread twice.

_A dark road. A lilting Ruthenian voice. Danger sparking in Jan’s blood. Two eyes, luminous with moonlight, staring challenge at him._

Even Bohun had changed.

There was as little left of the invulnerable Cossack colonel in Jurko Bohun as there was of the brash lieutenant in Jan Skrzetuski.

Jurko Bohun had _burned_ in those days, bright and cruel as flame. Now it seemed to Jan that the fire within had begun to consume the flesh that housed it. Perhaps memory had lent the Cossack stature to match the shadow he had cast over their lives, but it affected Jan strangely to see him so diminished.

Bohun stirred in his sleep, the dark brows drawing together, unhappiness carved deep into the lines of his face.

Had the blue fire faded from those eyes, Jan wondered, or would they be all he recognised?

As if in answer to Jan’s thought, the eyes flew open, blind with the horror of waking nightmare.

With a cry Bohun bolted upright, fighting to free himself of the covers, scrambling to rise from the bed. Yet the instant he tried to move his leg, pain knocked him back with a hammerblow. He did not fall, but only at a cost terrible to behold. Bohun swayed, his eyes half rolled up into his head, blanching to such an inhuman pallor that Jan was sure he would faint.

But he did not faint.

Instead Bohun fought: a brutal, ugly, tooth-and-nail war waged against pain. His breath came in sharp, shallow whines.

Horrified, fascinated, Jan found himself staring into eyes that did not see him. He felt that he gazed through open windows into the man’s soul: desperation, and fury, and defiance.

 _Merciful Christ,_ Jan thought, _his eyes have not changed at all._

Yet whatever the sightless eyes beheld was more than Bohun could withstand. He recoiled with a cry and—impossibly—tried to rise. His fingers clawed at the blankets and heaped furs on the bed, clearly intending to heave himself out of the bed by main force, dragging his lamed leg behind him.

“Stop!” Jan cried, starting forward.

Only then did Bohun seem to see him, though he did not quite seem to understand what it was he saw.

Unflinching, Jan met the madman’s gaze.

“I would not do that, if I were you,” Jan told him.

Sweat stood out on Bohun’s skin. Though the pale lips moved, no sound came out. Yet Jan read his own name there: _“Skrzetuski”._

“Do you know where you are?” Jan asked.

“I thought… _Rozłogi_.” The name seemed limned in flame, transfixing Bohun with dreadful rapture. “I dreamt I came to Rozłogi.”

Then Bohun shook his head, muttering to himself in Ruthenian: “But no! No, it’s not… It's not right! It's not _Rozłogi!_ I do not know this place! No, this isn’t—”

“Rzędzian has set your leg,” Jan interrupted in Polish, “but moving overmuch may undo all his hard, if grudging, work.”

“Rzędzian?” Bohun echoed. He scanned the room, seemingly seeking to glean fragmented memories from the corners.

The man was recovering, Jan thought, though slowly. He had not gone mad, as he’d first feared.

“Surely you remember him? I had to stand by the whole time he doctored you to be sure he would not smother you with a pillow.”

“Yes.” Though his eyes were still unfocused, Bohun’s voice was soft with seeping venom. “ _Rzędzian._ Yes, I remember him.”

“I dare say you do. He remembers you, too. It seems a common thing, this desire of people who have met you to kill you.”

Bohun blinked. He shook his head to clear it, then went rigid as a hunted animal when he found Jan still there.

“You are surprised to see me,” Jan commented, affecting a calm he did not feel.

“It _is_ you,” the Cossack whispered. Understanding dawned, and hatred followed like a red sunrise. _“Of course it’s you.”_

Jan said nothing, disquieted to hear the same resigned horror he himself had felt echoed in Bohun’s words.

“Why am I here?” Bohun cried. “This… this is not Rozłogi!” But he carried on before Jan could answer: “No, no! I remember now: I left. I rode. I—”

He broke off, chest heaving. Whatever memories passed behind his shuttered eyes were not peaceful.

“—I came to the gate in the night. To Rozłogi. _I rode to_ _Rozłogi..._ ”

He was slipping away again.

“So you have come! _Why_ are you here?” Jan demanded: a verbal slap than snapped Bohun back to the present.

He rounded on Jan at once: “Why did _you_ not let me die this time?” His head was high, glaring hatred and defiance, as though to have not been left to freeze in the mud were some cruel joke at his expense.

“I would not let a wounded man perish at my doors” Jan said, holding his gaze. “But perhaps I overstepped the bounds of mercy. Perhaps I would have done better to put you in the barn with the other beasts.”

Bohun sat up straighter, nostrils flaring.

 _How dare he?_ Jan thought with a cold-steel flash of fury. _How dare he take affront when his very presence here is an outrage against everything she suffered?_

“Do not even _speak_ ,” Jan warned through gritted teeth. His forced his hands to stay clenched by his sides. “I have given you all that Christian charity would require and more. I have had you healed. I have given you shelter. I have done all this, even though it is—it is _intolerable_ to think that you and Helena are under the same roof.”

Bohun’s anger vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving something raw and empty exposed.

 _“Helena?”_ Bohun whispered **.**

Merciful God, what limitless agonies bled through those three spoken syllables. Jan could almost pity him. Almost.

“You will stay away from her,” Jan told him, voice leaden with self-control. “You will answer my questions regarding where you have come from, and why. You will say no more. And you will not speak her name.”

Bohun swallowed, drawing pride about himself to cover his naked soul.

“I… I needed shelter,” Bohun said, after a long pause. He raised his eyes to Jan’s. “Even beasts need shelter, _lach_.”

“But how did you come to be at Rozłogi at all?”

“I had not intended to. I was camped away west by the great barrow.”

“The burial mound?” asked Jan, eyebrows raised. He had seen it many times: a high hill, grown over with trees in the ages since the pagan dead were lain to rest. One massive stone—once a door, perhaps—had tumbled down to make a great flat slab which legend made lurid with tales of sacrifice.

“Yes,” Bohun said, with a strange, shifting look.

“You camped there alone?” Cossacks were often superstitious. “Most will not go near them at night.”

“What do I care for that?” Bohun asked, lifting his chin.

“But why camp there at all?”

“What better place for a lone traveller, if none will trouble me there?”

Jan crossed his arms. The story was a believable one, should he choose to believe it.

“But you were not left alone, it seems.”

“A wolf found me—one of Satan’s own. I knew my horse would bolt, and I could not afford to lose her. As it was, I had barely time to mount, and then it was all I could do to stay in the saddle.”

“You? A famed Cossack horseman?”

If looks could kill, Jan would have perished in agony.

“I hadn’t eaten in many days.” Bohun’s eyes were dark and fathomless as he met Jan’s. “Perhaps the wolf had not, either.”

Jan could, at least, see the truth of his claim. Bohun had always been lean, but the fine-chiseled features were sharp with hunger. And he might well be hungry.

Bohun had once been famous in the lands about Rozłogi. Any peasant would have welcomed him into their home with the best they had to offer. Now he was notorious: seen as both a cause and a symbol of all the rebellion had brought down on the _tchernya_ of Rozłogi. There would have been no succour for him—not anymore.

“My horse ran on in the dark,” Bohun continued, “until she broke her leg and fell.” He frowned. “Poor, brave thing. She deserved a better end.”

“You have more compassion for a horse than for the Christian souls you murdered in their own home,” Jan said with disgust.

“Men may deserve death, but no horse has ever yet deserved the death that men brought it to. ” There it was: a flash of the strange nobility that twined with brutality as the warp and weft of Bohun’s soul.

Jan had served in cavalry his entire adult life—he felt the truth of Bohun's words keenly. War made its bloody demands on man and beast alike, but only one could knowingly choose to risk death.

“That is so.”

A pause.

“And is that when you broke your leg?”

“Yes.”

Bohun spoke as if that was all there could be to the story, but Jan had seen the broken limb. He had witnessed what skill it had taken Rzędzian to fix it. He could well guess at the shattering pain of that break—and more.

Jan could picture the desperate peril of that wild flight into the night. He imagined riding blindly through the dark with the snarling wolf snapping at the horse’s heels, carried by the rolling-eyed terror of a mount running heedless over unknown ground. A white road stretched out before him in his mind’s eye, frosted and silver, with the deceptive, flattening quality of moonlight.

The horror of that ride might have echoed in the hearts of men who had endured such a night. Yet none showed in Bohun’s face. Nor, Jan realised, would it have shown in his own.

“And the wolf?”

“Perhaps he ate my horse. I do not know. I took my sword and made for shelter.” The man’s face shone with sweat, but if pride kept him from admitting his pain then Jan owed him no reprieve. “I would say you should tell your peasants to be wary of that one, but there were always so many wolves about Rozłogi that it would hardly be worth the effort. Unless—”

Bohun looked about him at the elegant, well-appointed room, so unlike the feral opulence the Cossack remembered.

“—unless you have killed them all while building your new Rozłogi.”

“We did,” Jan said, voice hard. “And if you brought any of your fellow rebels with you, I will hunt them down as I did the wolves. I will hang scalplocks at my gate, if that is what is required.”

Bohun’s eyes lit.

“Ey, Skrzetuski,” he said softly, smiling a terrible smile that was no smile at all, “I wonder what would have happened, if we had crossed blades. Do you ever think of that?”

“No,” Jan hissed, lying.

“I do. Often.”

“There will be no duel and no glory, do you understand me? If you have come here with evil in your heart, I will see you buried and no word of your death will ever go back to the _Sietch_ to add to your fame.”

Bohun sat up in the bed, and for the first time he looked very hard at Jan Skrzetuski, seeing… Jan did not know what Bohun saw.

Bohun did not seem to know either: something ugly and uncertain flickered in his face.

Jan pressed on: “I swear to you that I will kill you, and any you have brought with you, if you intend harm to any in this place.”

“Why should I have come to your gates alone if I had men with me?” Bohun asked. It seemed so beside the point of all Jan said that he scrambled for a moment to make sense of the comment.

“You might have meant to let them in at night, once you were inside.”

“You think I broke my leg and nearly died of cold, all as a ruse to be allowed in?”

“Maybe not. I would have thought you could do better, Cossack hero as you are.”

Bohun snorted.

“For that kindness, I’ll save you the trouble of riding off in search of a Cossack troop that doesn't exist: I travelled alone. I give you my word on it.”

“I think I shall nevertheless have reason to ride to the burial mound,” Jan said coldly.

“You doubt my word?” Bohun demanded. “It is as good as yours, or better.”

Jan did not even deign to rise to such bait. “Say rather that I go to recover any possessions that my honoured guest may have left behind in his headlong flight from a single starveling wolf.”

“Do not call me a coward, Skrzetuski.” Bohun’s eyes glittered like pale stars. “There are worse things than wolves in the woods of Rozłogi.”

“Oh, do you spin me one of your blind storyteller’s tales, Cossack?” Jan asked, repulsed by the depths to which Bohun had sunk. “If you tell me you fled a single wolf, I would think you weak. But to make of one wolf a legion of devils, I would call you a coward thrice over, and a liar.”

“Ride to the barrow, then!” Bohun shouted, spit flecking his lips. “Go at midnight, for all I care, and be damned! Hey, go to Hell and knock on the door—to the devil with you!”

Only in that defiance did Jan glimpse the man he’d known in the lean spectre before him. Only hatred was left to lend Bohun life’s semblance.

Jan swallowed, quelling an emotion he hardly knew how to name.

“What need have I to invent monsters to trouble my nights,” he asked Bohun, “when I have you?” His control was slipping: he was speaking truths he had never meant to see the light of day.

“I am glad of it, then!” Bohun was deathly pale. “Glad, to know I haunt you as you haunt me! If even a memory of me disturbs the peace of your perfect life I shall sleep the better!”

But there was something _there_ underneath all that fury. Jan had been a leader of men for too long not to recognise it.

“What are you hiding?” Jan cut in. “Why were you at the burial mound? There’s nothing there!”

“Is there not?” Bohun taunted in that sing-song Ruthenian voice. “Oh, of course not, how could I forget? Rozłogi is yours now, isn’t it? Your own cozy little home, so safe, so quiet! So it must be as you say, _panie_ : nothing is there.”

“And so you return to your fool’s tale. What could be so shameful that you would stoop to such lies? Have you found another witch to befriend? Did she promise you a love potion, Cossack?” It was unchivalrous, Jan supposed, to taunt a wounded man, but he would find his contrition later.

“If you know I have befriended witches,” Bohun snarled, “maybe you should think before calling me a coward.”

“Oh, I can satisfy myself that there’s no marvel there: of course you’re a friend to witches. How not? You both work evil in the world, according to your natures. Had your Horpyna been a man, she might have caused yet more evil by her sword, and so would surely have made a fine, famous Cossack hero for your rebellion.”

When Bohun slept, Jan had thought the Cossack less dreadful than memory painted him. It had almost been possible to forget the cruel deeds the man had committed. Such crimes had seemed too great for any one man’s shoulders to bear, much less the injured man whose face showed such unhappiness in repose.

Now Jan marvelled that he could have been so credulous, so _blind_. He saw Jurko Bohun now; he recognised the demon that dwelled behind those witchfire-blue eyes.

“It would be charitable,” Jan told him, “if I could believe you a warlock. But, damned wretch, I know you for what you are. If you would not meet the Devil sooner rather than later, tell me now: if I were to ride to the mound, should I find evidence of one man’s camp, or is there a band of Cossacks lying in wait to burn the new Rozłogi down, even as you burned the old?”

“None! I came here alone! _And I did not burn it down!”_ Bohun’s eyes seemed the only living thing in that terrible, gaunt face.

“My apologies, I forgot that Cossack honour balked at burning down an orphan’s home once you’d murdered her kin.”

“Would justice have struck them down, had I not? Faithless!” Bohun’s teeth showed as he spat out the word. “Forsworn! But what does a word given to a Cossack count? You knights and nobles! By what right did they go back on their promise?”

“And is that why you’re here?” Jan demanded, leaning forward with his hands on the foot of the bed. “To take your vengeance again? Or can you not rest until you’ve taken every solace and happiness from Helena? Is that your plan? To rob her of all she has, until only you are left?”

“Even if I burned down the kingdoms of the earth, what good would it do?” Bohun cried. “She chose death! She chose death over me!”

Jan stepped back, appalled at the living Hell he glimpsed in Bohun’s eyes.

“Then go back where you’ve come from.” It was a command and a plea. “Go back, if you have any honour left at all. You will not tell me why you are here? Fine. But know this: I once thought you had a knight’s heart. Yet if you have come here for vengeance when we have twice spared your life, I will know you for a monster in truth.”

Bohun shook, the animating fury that ruled him making veins and tendons stand out like cordage under his skin.

“Leave,” Bohun hissed, “or save your insults for when I can answer with steel.”

Violence. Always the promise of violence, inescapable. It dogged Jan’s heels. It haunted his dreams. And now it sheltered beneath his roof, inside the walls Jan had built to guard all he loved.

Jan swallowed bile, his anger curdling to sickness of soul.

Jan was a warrior. Contradiction though it seemed, his sword could save lives. He had his orders. He had his duty. He had striven—would always strive—to do what was right. And he would implore God for forgiveness when he failed, as all soldiers must.

For long years he has fought to make a truce with himself, building high ramparts around his heart to guard against the past.

But Bohun’s eyes ( _a killer’s eyes_ ) brought back memories Jan had laboured hard to lay to rest, shaking the foundations of his fragile peace.

No wonder the wolf had not killed Bohun, Jan thought with disgust. Both were native demons of the borderlands, creatures of violence and blood.

_Blood._

The smell of it filled his senses.

The room swam before Jan’s eyes. He knew with sudden, terrible certainty that he could not remain in this room another moment. He would suffocate. He would go mad. He would begin to scream.

Unsteady as he was, Jan did not see how closely Bohun watched him, nor mark the shock that flashed across that mobile face.

Digging his nails into his palms, Jan forced the world to steady itself.

“I shall have food brought to you, as you are hungry,” he told Bohun, wheeling round to the door.

“Skrzetuski, I—”

“I swore to Helena that I would not let you die,” Jan said, holding tight to the iron of the door handle, cool against his skin. “But mark me: if you stir from this room or undertake any act that might distress her, you will learn the difference between what can kill you, and what will make you wish for death.”

Closing the door behind him, he stood alone in the dim hallway, struggling to calm his breathing and collect his thoughts.

A hundred desires and duties warred within him. He wanted this man out of his home. He wanted him gone, imprisoned, dead—he did not care, so long as the Cossack might be exorcised from their lives. None of it mattered so long as Bohun could not haunt Helena’s happiness, and his own.

 _Helena._ God have mercy, what must she be feeling, alone as she'd been all this past while as Jan waited for Bohun to wake? What must she be thinking? He must go to her at once.

 _But not like this!_ he thought desperately. _Christ, get a hold of yourself! You cannot go to pieces, not now, not when she needs you!_

Even as he thought it, Jan heard Helena’s light step. Looking up, he smiled through his turmoil, resolved that he should not be one more of her troubles.

Yet the instant she saw him, Helena opened her arms to him. He went to her, both of them holding tight to the other. Jan shut his eyes, forcing his breathing to match hers: in and out, in and out, grounding himself in the rhythm of her living body.

“I should be comforting you, love,” Jan whispered, “not the other way around. What kind of husband am I?”

“Mine,” Helena replied. One small hand pressed between his shoulders. Her arms wrapped so tightly about him that he could feel his bones shift.

“I love you,” he said fervently. “You have but to command me, and I will take him to Łubnie and he shall be gone from your life forever.”

“No, no!” Helena exclaimed, shaking her head. “You cannot do that. Even if I wished it, it is not honourable.”

Jan said nothing. He knew it would be a wretched thing to drag an injured man through the mud and misery of a spring road, all to hurry him to his death. Yet some part of Jan yearned to do so, feeling the cold, uncompromising justice of it. It would still be far less than Bohun had earned.

More than that, Jan felt keenly that when he had pardoned Bohun, they had entered into a covenant. By giving Bohun his life and freedom, it was understood that Bohun would never trouble Helena and Jan’s lives again. Now the Cossack had returned he had violated their accord.

So be it, Jan told himself. Retribution could only be deferred so long.

Yet, deeper even than a longing for justice, Jan felt an old, lurking fear. The past whispered to him of Khmelnytsky, whose life he had saved—and spared, perhaps, from the death fate had intended for him.

_...ad te, Virgo Virginum, Mater, curro, ad te venio, coram te gemens peccator assisto. Noli, Mater Verbi, verba mea despicere; sed audi propitia et exaudi…_

 By his hand, Khmelnytsky had lived to lead his rebellion. How could Jan’s hand not then be steeped in the blood Khmelnytsky had shed? How could Jan ever atone for the horrors his one act of dreadful mercy had unleashed upon the world? What defence was ignorance, weighed against such suffering?

_...I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions by in thy mercy hear and answer me..._

What, then, of Jurko Bohun? What of this other life he had spared?

Jan had pardoned Bohun on a day when Jan had felt that one more death on his conscience would have destroyed the last remnants of what made him human in God’s eyes. Jan had been sickened beyond enduring with the violence and nightmare of the rebellion. He had no cruelties left to wield in his country’s defence.

Pardoning Bohun had been the only kindness Jan could have offered him: Bohun had been a damned soul already—Jan had seen it in his face. But, living, Jan had prayed that he might yet find peace.

It seemed right to mark the dawn of their new life with an act of mercy. In setting Bohun free, Jan had hoped he would set them all free from the curse of civil war.

Thus, they had put the past behind them, and turned towards the light of a new life.

And Jan _had_ put the past behind him.

He had tried.

 _Khmelnytsky_.

 _Bohun_.

Could it be that Jan’s killing kindnesses would always bring ruin and horror on them all?

His confessor has told him it was pride to imagine such a thing. The prince had told him that there could be absolution in duty. So he had done his duty, and he had prayed.

_Inclina, quaeso, aures tuae pietatis ad preces huius servi tui, huius miseri peccatoris; et calignem vitiorum meorum radiis tuae sanctitatis dissipa, ut tibi placeam._

 Dear God, he had prayed.

_Incline, I beseech thee, thy ears of pity to the entreaties of this, thy servant, a miserable sinner; dissipate the darkness of my sins by the bright beams of thy holiness, in order that I may be acceptable in thy sight._

 He prayed that he might be forgiven. He prayed that he might forget.

But Jan had not earned forgetfulness. He remembered it all: the reek of rotten flesh, swollen bodies bobbing in the water, blood and shit and mud, corpses hanging starkly black against the morning sky. The tears of a fleeing Cossack boy, before he fell under trampling hooves. A charred scroll in the flame-seared arms of a Jewish priest. A woman’s bare, blackened foot beneath an upturned cart. Horses screaming, and men screaming, all brute beasts alike as they died.

All he’d known, all his certainties, all lost to a kingdom of corruption that feasted on the death of the world he had known.

Mankind had been revealed for what it was, and it was monstrous. Death had grown glutted and fat on the corpses mankind had made, gorging until it could eat no more, vomiting up horrors to trouble the waking world. Life became unclean, birthed from the bodies of the unburied dead: open mouths choked with breeding flies, the dead flesh alive with burrowing things beneath cold skin.

_Merito haec patior, Domine, quia peccavi._

Empty, raven-pecked sockets that _saw_ him, and knew what he had done.

_I deserve to suffer these things, O Lord, for I have sinned._

Now the old fear moved like Leviathan beneath the waters of his soul: _my fault_. What curses might his prideful, misplaced mercy bring down on them still? If sparing Khmelnytsky had nearly destroyed his very world, what might sparing Bohun bring on the home Jan and Helena had struggled to raise from ashes?

Helena sensed his distress, and if he did not name his anguish, her soul knew it well. Bohun was the emissary of all her horrors, a curse that tried to strike down all she loved: _“And now he’s murdered my whole family because of me!” “More innocent blood spilled, because of me!”_

“I wish he were gone,” Helena murmured, hiding her face in the warm fabric of Jan’s kontusz.

“So do I,” he said, and could say no more.

They stood thus for a long, long time, counting each beat of the other’s heart.

There had been so much darkness. But there had been light after darkness. They had found it together. That was victory enough. To have peace as would have been too great an indulgence in such a world as humankind had made for itself.

At last, she asked: “Can you find it in your heart to pity him?”

He must treat Jurko Bohun with kindness and mercy. He had to. He had to hope that sinners might receive better than their deserts.

“Easily enough, in truth,” he said softly. How good it was to feel her there in his arms, loving, warm, and alive _—alive! Thank you God, my salvation, merciful Christ. Of all your mercies, my sinner’s heart thanks you most for this: she is alive_. “I was thinking earlier that, had I lost your love, I too should go mad. But pity is not the same thing as forgiveness. Now that I see him again, I do not know if I have charity enough in my heart for that.”

Helena nodded. Her hair brushed the skin of Jan’s throat, soft and warm.

“I wish God had made him in some other way, so that he might not suffer so,” Helena said, with such sorrow in her voice that Jan silently damned Bohun’s soul.

Aloud he only said, “Amen.”

Helena might forgive, and Jan might try to forget. And yet…

 _“There are worse things than wolves in the woods of Rozłogi,”_ Bohun had said. A hard, dark hope rose in Jan’s breast.

If Rozłogi had ghosts, Jan thought, they had been sleeping. But Bohun had returned. Now, perhaps, they would have cause to walk abroad.


	3. Histories in Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jan rides out to investigate Bohun’s story of the night before: the camp by the barrow, the wolf that chased him, and the long journey that left Bohun unconscious at Rozłogi’s gate. Bohun had made dark hints about what Jan might find, and Jan discovers that Bohun may know far, far more than Jan wants to believe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the only Tolkien fanfiction I will ever write. It falls far short of the material it imitates but this one is for you, Professor.  
> On a related note, I used two kinda rare words:  
> \- flood: used here a sense of “any flowing body of water” like a river or a sea, rather than a deluge/natural disaster  
> \- lowering: an adjective, pronounced “lauh-er-ing”, which describes the way clouds get when they’re dark and oppressive. No relation to the sense of “to lower something down”.
> 
> If this terrain doesn’t sound like Poland/Ukraine, that’s because it’s my backyard. [Follow for more soft moss](http://pacificnorthwesterngothic.tumblr.com/).
> 
> The kurgan has only passing similarity to actual E. European burial mounds and menhirs are W. European. I know this but I have sold the last shred of academic integrity I possessed for #aesthetic.

Fog shrouded Rozłogi in grey silence, the firs standing like dim sentinels beyond the palisade.

Within its walls, the dooryard roiled with the clouded breath of men and of horses.

Jan bent from the saddle, taking Helena’s hand in his own.

“You are certain? You have but to say the word and I will stay.”

“I am certain, love,” she said. “Go, or it will be evening before you return!”

“And you have the pistols?”

“Jan,” Helena said, “he is abed with a broken leg, sleeping in a locked room.”

It was true, but Jan still felt Bohun’s presence in Rozłogi like an arrow left in the wound.

“I know him better than you.” Helena’s words rang with gentle certainty. “He would never harm me, even if he could.”

Jan wanted to protest that Bohun’s definition of doing “no harm” had encompassed kidnapping and an intent to force her into marriage and worse against her will. He wanted to urge Helena to check that the pistols he’d primed and loaded for her were still primed and loaded. He knew he must go, but his heart rebelled at the thought leaving her alone (surrounded by dozens of servants and by his own trained guards but without _him_ , and therefore alone) with Jurko Bohun.

But she was right: Helena knew Bohun as Jan never had. If she felt safe with him now, Jan should trust her.

Helena pressed his hand.

Her husband sat his horse, pale and resolute in the grey dawn, with the silver streaks that sorrow had given him in his dark hair. To any but his wife he must have seemed beyond the reach of fear. Helena knew better. With an effort of infinite love she withdrew all the tenderness she felt, holding it in abeyance so he could see the steel at her core.

Jan looked at her and saw a soldier’s eyes looking back, full of the practicalities of pain.

“When first Pan Zagłoba and I escaped from Rozłogi, I told him that Bohun would die if he ever touched me. You need not fear that I lack resolve now.”

He shook his head, denying even the possibility of such thoughts. Though assailed with doubts, doubts of Helena’s courage had never numbered amongst them.

“Then, if you are sure,” he said, “I will be back at evening. If you are sure.” He needed to hear her say it one more time and knew she would forgive him.

“I am sure.”

Jan kissed her hand, lips lingering over her warm skin. Then he released her, and turned his horse’s head towards the gate.

He tried not to remember the last time he’d left her at Rozłogi with the threat of Bohun hanging over their happiness.

 _It is different now,_ he told himself, looking back as they thundered across the lowered drawbridge. _History cannot repeat itself_.

But he crossed himself as he turned away.

Jan let the familiar rhythms of a scouting party soothe his spirits. The guards he rode with were his own, hand-picked and proven. Many were veteran infantry of Jeremi’s grown too old for active service: career soldiers whose survival bore testament to their competence. Jan could never be entirely at home without the habits of military life and discipline, and every one of those old soldiers was entirely of the same mind. The younger men of the company had never been in Jeremi’s service but had, by force of fellowship, taken on the military qualities of their comrades. Neither group were trained cavalry, but Jan had drilled them well enough that now they took up formation as naturally as breathing.

Jan trusted them with his home, his love, and his life. That none were Cossacks was only coincidence.

Their task was simple: to verify Bohun’s story.

The most immediate proofs had been established after Bohun was discovered. Not far from Rozłogi’s walls, Bohun’s tracks veered off the muddy road and onto the verge. From thence the trail led back west, away towards the barrow. What they might find _there_ was anyone’s guess, but Jan did not think that the Zaparozhian host was about to burst from the forest. Bohun had said he came alone, and Jan did not think he’d lied. The Cossack had always possessed a certain knightly honour—albeit from some pagan chivalric code which perhaps even Bohun himself did not fully understand.

More than that, Jan did not _want_ to believe Bohun had been reduced to falsehood. Some part of what they had suffered was redeemed in the honour of that violent soul. It had been right to see their enemy defeated, but it would have been a bitter thing to know him degraded. It would no longer have been a victory, but a destruction.

But Bohun _might_ have dissembled for reasons that seemed right to him. Jan could not rule out that possibility, not when it might mean ambush on the road ahead.

Still the deeper mystery plagued him: why _had_ Bohun come? That was a question Bohun had evaded. If he had indeed come alone, as he said, what possible purpose could there be? Jan had often heard that guilty men returned to the scene of their crimes, but he doubted that guilt could take root amongst the barren hatreds of Bohun’s heart.

He had no answers, nor found any in the swirling fog before him. Trying to think like his enemy required adopting strange, unsettling axioms, and Jan did not like to venture far down that path.

His only clue was the spectral horseman. Four nights ago, the watchman had said he’d seen a ghost rode up gate in the moonlight, then turn away towards the barrow. Jan believed in ghosts, but he had never sought to invent them when he had enough of his own. Instinct told him the rider had been Bohun. Yet if that were so, Jan could not imagine what had brought him to Rozłogi and thence away again. Had he expected to shelter in the ruins and, finding it rebuilt and fortified against him, ridden away? But why come to Rozłogi at all if he believed no one was there?

Revelation struck with the flash and force of a thunderbolt.

_If I had lost Helena, would I not make pilgrimage to the place where I had lost her, even were it nothing but haunted ruins?_

He glanced back into the fog that veiled the road to Rozłogi.

_Ave Maria, Mater Misericordiae._

Jan _had_ lost her once. To the end of his days, he would never be free of the memory.

_Rozłogi’s burned gate seemed the mouth of Hell—and in Hell I remained every hour that followed. I thought suffering was to be the last thing I would ever share with her in this life, and I was glad to live on in suffering until God let me join her in death._

He could not let himself think of such things. Jan brought all his iron discipline to bear, driving the horror back.

 _The past is past_ , Jan told himself ruthlessly. It was Bohun’s return that gave these ghosts the power to haunt the day. His present task would keep Helena safe, as no dark reflections could.

For one last, lingering moment he cherished Helena’s image. Then he locked it away, sealing the doors to his heart.

 _Duty_. He took up the familiar weight, both a burden and a shield. Life became a sequence of present moments that admitted no distractions. Duty demanded everything of him, and he offered himself up to it as he might to his God.

It had never been enough. He would never be a great man like Wiśniowiecki. But what little he could do gave him the numbness he needed to do what he must.

On they rode, deeper into primal forest.

Jan let the sounds of horses and harnesses fade into the background. His eyes focused on nothing so that he might see any break in the woodland pattern. If he had not been wholly focused on the immediate moment, the land through which they rode now compelled it.

Pine and hemlock stood in silent cathedrals where they alone had been masters out of time immemorial. Dark firs soared hundreds of feet above their heads, their jagged crowns vanishing into the fog. The horse’s hooves boomed hollowly on deep beds of ancient pine needles. Swaths of emerald moss blanketed stock and stone. Dewdrops caught in curtains of trailing lichen, falling like slow rain. The men sojourned in a green world, lush with decay and alien lives—and they knew themselves intruders.

Every man stiffened, sensing the growing danger as though it were something exhaled from the dark earth like mist.

So it was that, rounding a bend in the road, each man reined up in the same instant.

The bay mare lay across the path, the carnage of her broken body muted by the fog.

“Everyone but the trackers keep clear,” Jan told them. “The rest of you keep watch. I want your eyes and ears open—I won’t have us taken unawares.”

“Yes, sir!” they chorused, obeying with crisp discipline that comforted Jan’s spirit. Even now men such as these were guarding Helena.

_She will be safe._

Only three of them crossed the open ground towards the body: Jan and the two trackers. Grizzled old Wojciech led them, grumbling like an old bear as he leant on the shoulder of his protégé, a solemn-eyed lad named Mirosław. Where the aging hunter could no longer go, Mirosław had become his eyes and ears. Together they read stories from the earth as other men read books.

The squabbling vultures and other carrion fowl on the carcass shifted uneasily as the men approached, but their wariness at least seemed a sign that no other men were present.

As they drew nearer, Jan could see that something far deadlier than the birds had left its marks on the mare: the horse’s hind quarters were lacerated with bites, and there was no mistaking the ragged wreck of its throat and belly. Yet he would assume nothing until the trackers confirmed it.

Jan stood respectfully back as the two men scoured the ground, circling almost as the vultures had.

Waiting, Jan turned his back on the pair, facing the woods.

“So he did not lie,” Jan murmured. He felt something almost like gratitude to find Bohun unchanged. Yet if Bohun had not lied, that begged the question of how much of his tale was true.

_“If you know I have befriended witches then you should hesitate before calling me a coward.”_

Between concealed truths and lies lay oceans of uncertainty. Jan shoved dout away and did what he understood his duty to be in this moment. He kept watch on the woods.

Mist flowed in a chill tide over roots and around monumental trunks. No sound could be heard but the ocean-surf sigh of the wind in the trees. Even the birds seemed to have fallen silent. All was still.

There was only the forest.

Jan kept his eyes trained on the shadows beneath the towering firs, waiting for a flicker of movement.

 _Nothing is there,_ he chided himself.

Yet, even as he thought it, fear crept out from the green twilight under the boughs. It tugged at his senses, whispering to instincts inscribed in blood and bone.

 _Foolishness!_ Jan thought. But the dread grew, and with it a conviction that eyes watched him from the shadows.

Ancient, animal senses clawed at his reason, telling Jan that, if he looked away, he would never see the unseen watcher before it struck. He would die in fear and squalid ignorance, not knowing what had snuffed out his life, or why.

Cold sweat stood out on his brow. He trembled with the effort of making his body stand and face this death. Jan had charged thickets of spears and blades. He had spurred to meet the fate held in the muzzle of a stranger’s gun. He had been pursued by Tatar raiders across the Steppe—and that, he thought, had been what it was to be hunted. But now he understood what it was to be prey, and it was a horror beyond anything he had ever imagined.

Worst of all, Jan knew with sickening certainty that whatever watched him was waiting for him to break, simply for its own cruel amusement. It could strike at any time. Almost he began to wish that it _would_ attack so that he he might at least see the face of his fear.

Yet he would neither flee nor stand in frozen terror to await death. He was a soldier, and he would not break before this unknown horror.

Jan held the eyes of the forest, and he did not waver.

Then—without sound or movement to mark the change—it was gone.

Whatever _it_ was, its gaze turned from him. Had he not been a Steppe warrior Jan might have cried out, so sharp and sudden was his relief. Even so he gasped as the force that held him in its thrall broke. Releasing his deathgrip on his sabre hilt, Jan crossed himself with a shaking hand.

“Your honour?” Wojciech’s voice broke upon already shattered thoughts.

“Beg pardon for intruding on your prayer, your honour.”

“No,” Jan said, heart hammering, “that’s quite all right.” His eyes flicked back to the forest.

_Nothing there! What did you expect to see?_

He did not know, and the uncertainty troubled him.

Following Jan’s gaze, Wojciech frowned.

“Did you see something, sir?” he asked quietly.

“No,” Jan said. “But my God, either my imagination is running away with me or…” He paused. “Have you felt anything strange in the past few minutes?”

Jan already knew the answer: had he sensed any threat the veteran woodsman would have spoken.

“Strange? Not I, sir.” Wojciech replied in the same hushed tones Jan had used, his eyes scanning the forest. “Sometimes these woods do play tricks on the mind. But then again, sometimes they don’t.”

“Do you know what it was that killed the horse?”

“Oh,” Wojciech’s expression cleared. “That was a wolf, to be sure.”

_There, nothing worse than a wolf. Are you a child, to frighten yourself with such imaginings?_

“Well done, Wojciech.”

“There’s no need to thank me for so simple a thing, sir,” the tracker demurred. “A child could’ve told you that much. The ground was half-frozen last night, and the thaw has blown out the tracks a bit, but even accounting for that you can tell he was a big one. Desperate, too, to risk a horse’s hooves on his lonesome, without help from a pack. And there,” he drew Jan closer to the corpse, indicating a series of unsteady boot-prints, “is your Cossack. That one had the devil’s own luck not to have broken more than a leg when the horse fell. Lucky, too, not to end up in the wolf’s belly.”

“He always did have the devil’s own luck,” Jan muttered. He misliked Wojciech’s turn of phrase, _“your Cossack,”_ but it seemed churlish to reprove him—not least when he was so grateful for the concrete realities of this report.

“Must’ve been a long road to Rozłogi for him.” Wojciech’s voice was harsh with uninflected fact. “A long road, and cruelly hard. Most would’ve given up and frozen to death.”

“Did you see his leg that morning?” Jan asked in an undertone.

“Eh, I got a glimpse—a nasty break, that. But the cold should’ve killed him, your honour. He shouldn’t have gotten to Rozłogi at all, nor hoped to get there in the first place,” Wojciech said. “I doubt he did hope as much, unless he’s madder than they say.”

“What then?”

“If half the things I hear of him are true, I reckon he preferred to crawl rather than lay down and wait for death to find him.”

Jan did not like to think of that. Nor did he wish to picture what that journey might have been like—to be wounded and alone in the night with the eyes of the wildwood on his back.

He was saved from a response by Mirosław. The boy called out with a note in his voice that made the head of every man present snap round.

“Sir! Old father! Look at this!”

Mirosław had made his approach to the horse’s body and was studying it intently.

“The wolf—he didn’t finish,” Mirosław said.

Jan picked his way closer.

“How can you be sure?”

Mirosław pointed at the carcass as if that were all the explanation one could need.

Wojciech hurried to the boy’s side, throwing Jan a pleading glance.

The two trackers conferred with another in a woodsman’s language of gesture and grunted half-words. Step by step, they made their progress over the ground around the carcass, poring over each inch of mud for what seemed like hours before advancing to the next.

Jan kept his silence, watching the two men work.  Neither were to be hurried, but his blood raced. He restrained the urge to look back at the woods, and bade himself believe he did not feel the urge at all.

Slowly, the old tracker and his pupil peeled away from the body, following a trail that led all the way to the edge of the forest. Then, without a word or backwards glance, they ventured in under the trees. Further and further they went, until they were all but swallowed in the murk. Jan was about to call out to them, but on the instant they turned about and retraced their footsteps.

Returning to the mangled carcass, Wojciech bent low with the air of one confirming what he already knew. Beside him Mirosław stood, staring westward through the mist.

Eventually Wojciech straightened, sighing like an old dog.

“Well, sir,” he said slowly, “for starters, it’s as we said: even if the birds have been at their breakfast all morning, our wolf ought to’ve eaten far more before he left, once the Cossack was away.”

Mirosław nodded his agreement, frowning. Very little troubled the youth; Jan wondered if the boy disapproved of the wolf’s wasteful ways.

“What could drive a wolf from his kill?” Jan asked. “Particularly if he was so large a brute.”

“Well.” The old man shifted, not quite meeting Jan’s eyes. “Well, it’s hard to say.”

Disciplined guards though they were, Jan knew every man within earshot straining to listen.

“And?” Jan prompted, trying not to snap. He knew full well what fear could do to soldiers, and he did not want his men jumping at shadows.

“Might be there was someone else there, other than the Cossack.”

“Another person? Speak plainly: what did you find? Who else was here?”

Mirosław spoke instead. He raised his arm, pointing into the trees: “The barefoot man.”

In the hushed silence that followed the very forest seemed to listen.

“Are you telling me a man was here other than Bohun?” Jan asked the boy. He cast a glance at Wojciech, demanding that he clear the dread from those cryptic words.

“It does look like it wasn’t just the wolf and Bohun who were out on the road last night,” the hunter said. His weatherbeaten face was set in dogged determination, as though he would get the facts out, whether he wanted to or not. “It’s hard to tell just what happened, ‘specially since the Cossack was dragging that leg behind him. But somebody else was here. That’s certain.”

“So Bohun wasn’t alone. He lied.”

“Can’t be sure of that, your honour. Could be the stranger was here before, or he came after. Don’t know that he was a friend, though. But… I really can’t say what happened for sure.”

The tracker’s eyes flitted to the forest, then to his listening comrades. No man as attuned to his environment as Wojciech could fail to sense the tension in the air.

“You’re a good man, Wojciech, and a steady one,” Jan said. “Come now, tell me what you think happened.”

Wojciech scratched the back of his neck, not quite meeting Jan’s eyes.

“What I see is this: a wolf runs, and the horse falls. I can’t tell much more. It couldn’t even swear that it was the fall that broke the Cossack’s leg. But _that”_ —he pointed at a series of slashing lines in the mud—“was a sword. And your Cossack wasn’t just using it to hold himself up.”

“He was attacked? By the wolf or by the man?”

“I’ll come to that, sir, begging your leave. It gets confused. There’re a whole lot of tracks and marks, all mixed up so it could mean anything or nothing. But…” Wojciech hesitated, his gaze darting down the road that led to the barrow. “It looks like something heavy got dragged through the mud a ways, back west, and I think it was the Cossack.”

“Do you tell me that Bohun was dragged by force?”

“It’s just as likely that he tried to crawl that way all by himself. He might’ve wanted to go back to his camp rather than all the way out to Rozłogi. But what’s certain is that, if he started back that way, he soon doubled right back on his trail.”

“Back towards Rozłogi?”

“Yes, sir. And there… there the barefoot man’s tracks are clear, at least. Whether he’d come to the spot Bohun turned back from before Bohun was ever there, at the same time, or after, I can’t say. But from that point he and the Cossack followed the exact same trail.”

“Is it possible they went together? Did Bohun lead him?”

 _“I travelled alone,”_ Bohun had said. _“I give you my word on it.”_

“That I don’t know,” Wojciech said. He pointed in a direct line off the road. “The Cossack crawled onto the harder ground of the verge, dragging his broken leg and taking his sword with him as a crutch. You can’t read much else after he gets on the roadside. That earth was frozen solid.”

“So we do not know if Bohun was pursued, or if this man came later and perhaps even helped him when he found him. Do—do you even know if Bohun might not have gone to meet this man?”

“Not that last, I think. Because of the wolf.”

“What of the wolf? Can you tell what happened when?”

“The wolf brought the horse down, to be sure,” Wojciech said. “The hoofprints and pawprints came running up the road together, the wolf chasing the horse. As I take it, your Cossack seems to have beaten the wolf off—wounded him too, by the looks of it. Fights are hard to read, sir, but I think that Bohun gave as good as he got. There’s blood on the wolf track.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Would be hard to fight a wolf when you couldn’t hardly stand. But whatever happened, the wolf ran.”

Jan frowned, trying to get the story straight in his head. This fight with the wolf seemed to have no bearing on the mysterious stranger.

Wojciech continued quickly: “But after the wolf was gone, that’s when this man came out out the woods.”

Mirosław looked up at his mentor then, brows furrowed. He tugged at Wojciech’s sleeve. Wojciech shook his head—a sharp, small gesture—and glanced significantly at the listening guardsmen around them. Oblivious, Mirosław pointed at the tracks by the forest’s edge, as though the older man were deliberately refusing to see the obvious.

“What is it?” Jan asked, suddenly sure he did not wish to know.

Mirosław turned.

“The wolf ran off, but it ran _to_ the barefoot man,” he said.

A chill crept up Jan’s spine.

“It attacked him?” Jan’s hand brushed the hilt of his sabre.

“No, your honour.” The young man’s face was unreadable. “It ran to him, like a dog to its master.”

Jan saw again the witchfire gleam of Bohun’s eyes as he’d said, _“There are worse things than wolves in the woods of Rozłogi.”_

He fought back the urge to cross himself.

The thought seemed to have occurred to the others. Jan saw a flurry of apotropaic gestures and nervous glances westwards. Out there, beyond the fog, lay the barrow.

Jan swallowed, trying to bend these events to something he might contend with.

“Might it have been a dog, then, if the man commanded it?”

“Might have been,” Wojciech said slowly. “A man might train a dog to run down a horse, that’s certain. Might even be able to train a wolf, if he raised it from a pup.”

Something in the man’s tone gave Jan the suspicion that he was being patronised.

“Do you think that’s what happened, Wojciech?”

“Can’t say for sure, your honour.” Wojciech’s face had gone blank with the studied impassivity of a soldier who must not tell his officer “no”.

“Mirosław?”

Mirosław had mimicked his mentor’s expression, but imperfectly. His eyes told Jan what he did not wish to know: _it was no dog._

Jan looked from one to the other.

“Well,” Jan said brusquely, retreating into military forms even as Wojciech had. “Good work, both of you. If there’s nothing else to be seen, we’ll mount up and press on to the barrow.”

“Yes, sir,” they replied.

As they swung up into the saddle, Jan did not miss the glances his guards gave each other.

He fixed the dispassionate, confident mask of a superior officer more firmly in place and urged his horse forward.

The fog was still thick on the road that lay before them. They could not turn back and let the trail grow cold, much less risk it being washed away by an untimely spring rain. There might even still be some allies of Bohun’s lying in wait at the barrow—all these strange events might yet be a kind of mummery to throw him off the scent.

If a troop of rebel Cossacks were roaming these lands, it was Jan’s duty as a nobleman to find them and kill them. If this were some stratagem of Bohun’s, it could only have vengeance and harm to Helena as its aim.

Jan could not know without riding on, so on he rode.

His men had been eyeing their commander carefully, watching for any sign of uncertainty. Nothing showed in Pan Skrzetuski’s handsome face—neither fear nor doubt. Were it not for his eyes, he would have seemed a man of carven stone. The younger men shivered at the look in those eyes, but the veterans nodded to each other with grim smiles of recognition. That, those smiles said, was a true Wiśniowiecki officer.

 

 

Jan had seldom been as proud of any men under his command as he was of his household company that afternoon. Despite all they’d seen and heard, they continued to the burial mound without a murmur of protest. They rode hard, urging their horses to greater speed the sooner to be done with their task and be away, for none now desired to ride back to Rozłogi in twilight.

At midday they reached a holy place of Jan’s heart: the spot where God had first brought Helena and himself together. Time had altered it, as it had all things. What had once been a low point, often flooded, had become a broad stream as civil war had left miller’s dams and weirs untended. The water had carved its way through the land when the unnatural weather of those tumultuous years had made nature a thing as destructive as the rebellion itself. Yet once violent and untamed, the new creek had allowed for the building of a new mill and weirs close by the village. Things could never return to the way they’d been before, but time’s slow workings could turn wounds to scars.

Watching that torrent—already strong in earliest spring—the nobleman in Jan mused that a bridge or even a ferry might need to be built. It was a consolation and a luxury, this worry. Men whose loves had died could not worry for their loved ones’ safety. Corpses knew nothing of spring but green roots twined through forgotten bones.

Sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof, however. For all their care, it took far longer to cross the treacherous, fast-flowing flood than any of them had expected. The spring thaw had barely begun, but the stream flowed fast and deep. Horses stumbled and men cursed as icy water soaked through wool and leather.

It was thus a cold and anxious party which left the main way and rode the final pathless leagues to the ancient grave mound.

In all the time Jan had lived at Rozłogi, he’d never visited the barrow. Now, still unseen, it loomed in the landscape of his senses. Long before they beheld its crowning trees above the forest canopy, the company had fallen under its shadow. No man spoke. Even the horses made no noise but only breathed in steady clouds, their ears trained forwards.

The land sloped gently upwards, climbing to the rise upon which the tumulus stood: a dark hill, grown over with gnarled trees. Questions of whose hands had raised that ancient barrow or for whom could be answered only in legend. The truth slept with the dead.

As they drew near, Mirosław gasped and rose in his stirrups, pointing. There, just beyond musket range, the earth was pockmarked with hoofprints and long, sliding gouges where a panicked horse had fled.

No skill was required to follow those tracks back to Bohun’s camp. It was exactly as the Cossack had said: a single fire that had since burned to ashes, a bedroll, a lute, and a pannier of jumbled treasure, gear, and weapons that Jan felt no need to sort through here and now.

Jan felt his nerves straining, eyes drawn to every shift in the fog and every softly shivering branch, trying to prove to himself that there was nothing more here than what his eyes saw. The shrouded forest that had surrounded them all the way from Rozłogi must truly have been a chattering springtime paradise—because _this_ was true quiet. The very air was heavy with the weight of dead centuries.

“It will be as before,” Jan told his men. “The trackers and I will dismount. The rest will keep watch.”

He had barely spoken above a murmur but the following silence fell as though it had disliked being broken.

 _“Ride to the barrow, then!”_ Bohun’s words echoed in Jan’s ears. _“Go at midnight, for all I care, and be damned!”_

Jan had known only to be wary of the barrow. It seemed Bohun knew more.

Watching Wojciech and Mirosław search, Jan knew that whatever answers the camp might hold, his own errand lay beyond it. He could ask no man to come with him. The conviction had settled over him as though it were not his own thought but something risen up out of marrow or of earth: this was his task, and his alone.

Skirting the camp and the trackers, Jan raised his eyes to the grave mound.

He hardly knew where his feet led him. The earth rose under him and he climbed, moving amongst the trees. At every stock or stump he turned aside, following the most open path, which somehow led him always in the same direction. At last he found himself high on the eastern slope. Before him a great menhir lay toppled on its side, half-blocking the threshold of an ancient entrance into earth.

As if to defy the unease that gripped him, Jan forced himself forwards.

 _The peasantry believe this was a sacrificial stone,_ Jan thought with a shiver, looking at the fallen doorstone. So many legends surrounded this one, lonely place that a legion of demons should have crowded in that shadowed doorway. But if every story differed in detail, they agreed on one point: fear made its home here.

He took a step nearer, drawn now by a stronger current flowing beneath his dread. Gently it called, brushing his mind with a feather’s touch, as sweet as Helena’s kisses.

The slab lay before him on the grass, cold and black with dew. Jan stretched out his hand to the fallen stone. The moment he touched it his mind cleared long enough for the certainty of his folly to seize him in a stranglehold. Then he was bound, hand and foot. Rooted to the spot, his every sense honed with terrible intensity upon the stone beneath his hand.

It was the warmth of his own skin that made the stone feel less cold. _That was all it was_. Yet he did not stir his hand, nor could he, and his pounding heart made the blood throb though his limbs so that, focused as he was on the very tips of each finger, he could almost imagine—he could almost _swear_ he felt—

It was his own heartbeat he felt, and only that. If he allowed any other answer he would begin to scream.

Fear surged up within him, filling him with the need to flee, yet even that was barely sufficient to overcome the stone’s magnetic hold. He drew his hand away only by infinitesimal degrees, fighting with leaden limbs against an unseen current. The instant he was released he knew a stab of terror—overpowering and wholly inexplicable—which used the deepest spell that might bind his heart: _Helena, lost._

And from some echoing nightmare of his own imagination he heard her voice raised in an agonised shriek, so full of anguish and horror that it rent his soul.

Heart hammering, Jan spun round, though he _knew_ his ears could not have not heard that terrible sound. Yet her name was on his lips as he stared wildly into the fog, seeking her though he knew she was not there. She _could_ not be there, he knew. But none of the visions that haunted him had ever screamed before.

_It isn’t real. It’s never real. For God’s sake, hold together! She isn’t here!_

It was all in his mind, as it always was. Whatever demons dwelt in this place, they could only turn his own fears against him, and he at least knew how to battle those. If the evil of this place was real, the horror was not. Shivering with cold sweat, Jan staggered down the mound back towards the Bohun’s camp.

He descended like one in a dream, heart aching, fighting a voice that whispered that Helena was here, that he was leaving her there, alone and frightened in the fog.

It was impossible. Whatever had just happened, he was certain some force had found his fears and ripped them from his secret heart to turn against him. That, he thought, was what had given this darkness power. Jan knew he was not a weak man, but he had met his weakness in the swamps of Zbaraż. His mind had not broken, but Jan had learned that there might yet be a point at which it could break. He knew would never be a coward because, before his courage broke, he would first go mad. But he had his fears, and sorrow had left its marks on his soul.

A desperate loneliness seized him—a yearning to unburden himself to one who understood the weight of such burdens.

 _Michał,_ he thought. _Oh Michał, how I wish you were here._

Jan stood at the foot of the grave mound, staring into the blank expanse of mist above him.

He had seen and felt so much pain in his life. He had even tasted madness. But Bohun had chosen this place for his camp, and that bespoke a pain and a madness beyond anything Jan could understand.

“Wojciech?” he called.

Every breath and footfall as Wojciech approached seemed deafening, as if the tracker was wheezing in Jan’s very ear. Mirosław supported him, but Jan could see that the cold and damp must be biting into the old man’s bones.

“It seems to be as the Cossack told you, my lord,” Wojciech said lowly. He did not whisper, and Jan admired his courage. Yet Wojciech held a firm, fatherly arm around Mirosław’s shoulder; the boy kept peering towards the barrow. “There are the signs of a camp, and only one man’s bootprints. The wolf came running into the camp and went straight for the horse. Looks like the horse broke free of its tether or your Cossack cut it free.”

Jan suppressed the urge to correct that repeated phrase “your Cossack”. In this unsettling place which Bohun had chosen as his shelter, it seemed as well to say “your curse”.

“So the wolf chased horse and rider down towards the road?”

“It surely did. It breaks your heart to see how that poor horse ran.”

“And there are no other signs? No pursuers who came from the forest?”

“None near the camp,” Mirosław spoke up.

Wojciech met Jan’s gaze steadily, considering his commander—a man more than half his age, for all his rank and privilege.

“Doesn’t mean there might not be something to be found in the woods around here, but there won’t be time to cover all that ground before it gets dark,” Wojciech said, looking at the dark circles under his young lord’s eyes. “But the Cossack’s camp is sound enough. I could stay the night and see what’s here to be seen. If it was good enough for one Cossack, it’d be good enough for the likes of me. Mirosław will keep an eye out for anything on the road back.”

The offer was so brave, so _genuine_ , that Jan could hardly speak.

“May be,” Wojciech added quietly, “your lady wife might worry less if she could be sure of what’d happened.”

“I couldn’t—I won’t risk adding another death to that man’s tally,” Jan said, fighting for composure. “But I honour you for your offer, Wojciech, truly I do. I can’t—how deeply I appreciate—” He swallowed. How could he say what this one man’s devotion meant, when Bohun had seemed to bring back all that was ugly in the world?

“Well, sir,” Wojciech said briskly, affecting not to see the sudden brightness of Jan’s eyes, “with your permission, I think we’d best pay a bit closer attention to the Cossack’s trail on the way home.”

Mirosław nodded agreement, face intent.

It would slow their return journey, and the risk of being benighted in the forest was not one to be undertaken without cause. Yet Jan knew better than to press either of these two men for reasons which in all likelihood were no more than a hunch. A guess from such woodsmen was better than ten reports from any scouting party. Jan glanced upwards at that dully silver part of the fog that concealed the sun, and made his choice.

“It shall be as you suggest,” he said.

Wojciech nodded, fully understanding the significance of Jan’s glance.

“We’ll go as quickly as we can, your honour,” the tracker assured him.

“No, take your time: if there’s aught to be found, we must find it.”

 

 

As they rode homewards the fog was finally swept away in a rising wind, but the clouds lingered. Only in the west was the sky visible: a blood-red gash beneath lowering grey.

Wojciech bade Mirosław took the lead and the young tracker sat his horse with his head craning far forward over his horse’s withers as he studied Bohun’s trail.

It was easy enough to see and follow: the grass and brambles by the roadside had been flattened. The blood on Bohun’s track had frozen in the night and faded to brown. When Mirosław showed Jan the rusty streaks that marked Bohun’s progress, that bloody trail told a desperate tale. Yet the earth could not tell them whether one man or two had passed that way.

Before, Jan had struggled to put himself in Bohun’s mind. Even now, he could not guess what madness had brought him back into their lives. But all he had seen that day made it far too easy to paint the picture of what the night had been like—to lie in the cold moon-shadow of the barrow, to be carried by a fear-mad horse, to be pursued, and to be forced to crawl like beast to an uncertain shelter.

 _And perhaps looking over his shoulder all the way, fearing what might follow_.

They were within sight of Rozłogi’s walls when Mirosław, still studying the trail, let out a cry that made them all jump out of their skins. The lad dismounted like an otter sliding down a riverbank. He sprang onto the verge, hunkering down to inspect some sign, then began rooting through the tall grass. At last he raised his prize high.

There, glinting dully in the light of the westering sun, was Bohun’s sabre.

The company sat in silence as if in the presence of some dread omen.

“Why discard it after dragging it all the way here?” Jan wondered, glancing towards Rozłogi. “Did he think we would not let him in if he were armed?”

“He was only using it to help him walk, to be sure,” said Wojciech, studying the weapon. “See the nicks on the blade?”

“And yet he threw it away at the last. Perhaps he was too weary to hold it.”

“But only once he was in sight of the gate,” Wojciech said, pointing towards home. “He had to go on hands and knees from here. Look there: he must have cut his palm open on that stone.”

“Perhaps he was then willing to crawl the last distance, knowing the end was in sight.”

The sabre was a long, heavy thing, likely to sink deep in the earth with any weight on it—an awkward crutch.

“Could be,” said Wojciech.

Mirosław sought the old man’s eyes, then looked to Jan. All but imperceptibly, Wojciech nodded.

The twilight made itself heard then: nature muttering to itself as night stirred beneath the eaves of the forest.

Jan silently held out his hand to Mirosław. The lad drew near, handing the sabre to him, pommel first. From the way the young man looked up at him, Jan could tell he wished to speak.

“What is it, son?” he asked in an undertone.

“The Cossack looked back first, your honour,” Mirosław said, speaking softly though he stood at Jan’s stirrup. He pointed to the tracks. A clear footprint could be seen, facing back, deeply sunken in the mud, as though its owner had stood a long time. “He waited until he was sure he was alone. Then he threw the sword away. When he was sure.”

 

 

Jan held Bohun’s blade as they rode the short distance back to Rozłogi, the unfamiliar hilt strange in his hand. It was only a sword, he told himself. He had held it before, when first he set Bohun free. It was only a sword. Yet he could not help thinking that Rozłogi’s murdered dead might sense the presence of the weapon which had ended their lives. His hand twitched, imagining how many dying curses might be wound about the steel he held in his hand.

Helena might not even recognise the weapon, but Jan would not conceal what he had found from her. Though there was much that he wished to shield her from, hard truths at least left a clean wound; truth concealed was a corrosive thing.

The watchman had recognised them as they had lingered at a distance by the roadside, so the little drawbridge was open as they came up the road. The welcoming lights of home shone soft and golden through the gathering gloom. Jan spurred forward, giving free rein to all the desires that had bade him return to Helena’s side.

As he rode, Jan wondered what it must have been like to see Rozłogi’s palisade in the moonlight, the goal so near—merely a few minutes’ gallop—but so desperate a distance to crawl over frozen ground. Thinking of the long road they’d travelled that day, grim respect filled Jan’s heart: a soldier’s pride in the strength of his foe. Whatever else he might be, Bohun was neither a liar nor a coward.

Yet beneath that thought was a growing certainty, unsettling in its implications. It brought with it a chill that had nothing to do with the bite of an early spring night.

Jan knew, as certainly as though he himself had made the moonlit journey, that Bohun had only dared discard his sword when he was within sight of safety.

Before, Jan had feared what new evil Bohun might have intended. After all he had seen, a new spectre now loomed: that of a fear before which Bohun himself had fled, and which might follow him like a curse—straight to Rozłogi’s gates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what I learned writing this fic? That the Brits are really confused about what buzzards are. And creeks.


	4. Long Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caged up with his thoughts, Bohun tries to understand the events that have brought him to Rozłogi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to give Bohun more than the five minutes of actual introspection Sienkiewicz gave him. I also tried to make it feel like the inside of Bohun's head. It's a mess in there, folks.
> 
> Apologies for the one Shakespeare ripoff line. I'm a hack, but at least I'm a _pretentious_ hack.
> 
> I also posted this through a haze of springtime allergies, so if you spot any typos, please let me know!

He fled through a chasm of impenetrable forest. A shadow-blighted road twisted out before him. Black branches raked the moon’s face as he fled. A wolf howled, fear followed, and the wind was full of voices.

 _“Run!”_ Horpyna had said, long ago, laughing in that new, heartless way. _“Keep running! And don’t stop if you want to live!”_

The mare knew to fear the wolf, but what hunted them now drove her beyond fear. She flew in blind, animal terror until at last she stumbled and they both fell. Cold earth hammered the breath from his lungs. It was all he could do to drag himself beyond her thrashing body before the wolf was upon them.

The wolf snarled, but Bohun’s sabre was in his hand. Even then he’d still thought he might escape.

 _«My son!»_ A voiceless, wordless cry which only his heart heard and understood. _«Run!»_

Cold hands seized him, burning his flesh. Mud filled his mouth, and as his shattered bones ground together a scream clawed up out of his chest.

Death held no terror for him, but _this_ death he did fear.

_“Not yet, Jurko. Not yet.”_

Then there was a whispered word that seared like hot iron as it suborned Bohun’s will: _“Run!”_

In the end, he had crawled—but it was not intended that he should go far.

Night’s chill stole deep into his bones. Some part of him knew that he would not be permitted to die, but cold had been his first fear and he was alive because he had never failed to fight it.

He must keep moving. Stillness was death. That was all he knew. That was all that mattered. His choices were the forest or the road. And at the end of the road… Rozłogi.

_Rozłogi._

The dream shattered around that one name. Bohun impelled himself up through the wreckage, up into consciousness, clawing towards it, eyes opening and greedy for the sight of it.

The shock of what he woke to stole a beat from his heart.

Rozłogi haunted him. It was the ghost of a home he’d never had. But it cast no shadow in the waking world.

This was not Rozłogi. It could not be. This place was less real than memory: pale and brittle, the linens too white, the light through the glass too flat. It was too frail to house any of the living, beating, heartflesh-red emotions he’d known here—neither love, nor fury, nor despair.

Rozłogi-that-was had perished, and there was nothing here to see. What had he expected? He’d already known that! But the charred ruins he’d seen before had been kinder than Rozłogi rebuilt. At least he had belonged to Rozłogi’s death; reborn, Rozłogi had made him a stranger. There was no refuge for him here, not in the peace and the quiet.

Bohun pulled a blanket about his shoulders, curling around the rage that burned behind his ribs. Every time he had woken since coming here it had been thus. Every time, he woke to an Rozłogi that was somehow neither fairy tale nor nightmare, but mere wood and walls. And what was he, in such a place?

Bohun had burned down his old world, and now he did not belong in the new one.

_New worlds are born of blood and smoke, Jurko._

He’d thought it would be better to die at Rozłogi. He would have slit his throat and died in the ruins.

_Not yet, Jurko. Not yet._

But Bohun did not know this place. He did not want to die a stranger, unknown, unwanted, unloved. Better to have died on the barrow than here!

The room began to close in on him. The blankets tangled around his limbs. The damasked bed drapes hung so heavily that he had to fight to breathe. Breathe? He was dead! Rozłogi was gone and he was the only ghost who had lingered on: alone, and with all he’d ever longed to do undone. Nothing he’d done had ever mattered when weighed against what he’d lost, and if he did not get up, if he did not run—if he did not _move!_ —he would choke on smoke and ashes.

Grinding his teeth, Bohun took his injured leg in his hands and heaved it over the side of the bed. Moving fast so that fear might not stop him, he put his weight on his good leg and stood. The pain was blinding, but God, _God_ , at least it was familiar. Shuddering, he clung to it. Cold sweat trickled down from under his hair. Teeth bared, he lurched forward, staggering into the wall, then half-hopping, half dragging himself along by it towards a great, glittering window.

A bench had been placed before the window. Bohun collapsed onto it with a groan that scoured his throat. Yet at least he had gained the window: that much was his. Panting, he braced his hands at either side of the frame and pressed his burning forehead to the cool glass.

 _“And you fly away from that window, little bird_.”

From his seat, Bohun looked out over the remade Rozłogi, wreathed in fog.

Once, Rozłogi had been a haven. It had been the beginning of a minstrel’s song. It had even been a home to him, more than any other place had ever been. Now even that tenuous link was gone—obliterated. Rozłogi had changed, and he had not. It resembled no conception of “home” to which he could have ever matched himself. Even the windows seemed alien, the panes large as a cathedral’s. He had seen cathedrals. He had seen mansions and palaces, even the khan’s _saray_ —places of gold and glass and gilt. But this was _Rozłogi,_ and he remembered how its mud had held fast to his bootheels.

He clenched his fist, imagining the crash and the shattering and his own blood amongst the glass. But he did not strike. He hated every link in the chain of events which had brought the glass here, but God, he was so grateful to have it.

Everything in this place was sharp and new. Only the earth was old. The earth remembered him. It had drunk the blood he’d spilled.

Bohun swallowed back nausea, forcing his eyes to fix out beyond the palisade. There, hardly to be seen for the fog, was the Rozłogi he remembered: the trees of the cherry orchards, and the evergreen wilds. As long as he could see the woods there in the shrouded distance, the walls of this new Rozłogi did not seem to press in on him so.

Was he the only one who mourned what had been lost?

The jumbled, dragon-hoard roughness of old Rozłogi had been comfortable to his soul. He had amassed a Sultan’s ransom in gold and jewels, all to buy a hope of Helena’s smile or a glimpse of himself reflected softly in her eyes. But those days had already been gone. He saw her fear of him when she looked at him, and her fear it fed his own. He had lavished gifts on her and promised—threatened—more. But the gifts had been promises against terrors she had not known to fear. (They were _his_ terrors. Bohun had never tried to understand hers.)

 _“So ask for anything,”_ he had said. _“D’you want a kingdom? It’s as good as yours. You’re my queen. I’m your dog and warrior. Just tell me what to do, what to get you. Just so long as you don’t run from me anymore. Just so you’ll stay with me, and just so you’ll love me_.”

Gold was a language he could speak, and he’d thought she’d understand.

 _You will never know hunger,_ he had wanted to tell her.

Bohun could remember the way hunger had gnawed at his insides, sharp-toothed in the concave hollow of his belly.

 _You will never know cold,_ his gifts had said.

Winter had stalked him through long nights with a hunter’s patience. Bit by bit it tried to steal his body from him—fingers and toes, then limbs, until his numbed flesh became a blundering weight to be fought. If he had not fought, it would have taken all.

Bohun pulled the blanket closer about his shoulders. His body and mind bore scars, but he did not wish to forget. Why should he wish to forget battles he had won?

He remembered the fog that stole over the mind as the meat that housed it died. He remembered hunger loosening his teeth so he could shift them this way and that with the tip of his tongue. He remembered how the body clung to survival, trading everything it had to give to buy life. Starvation had robbed him of choice. He had eaten insects and worms when he had to. He had even tried to eat grass when there had been nothing else. But most of all he remembered the mud: grit scraping against his teeth, when all that was left of his mind was the longing for the forgotten feeling of being full.

Some nights he had crept into sties and byres, breaking the ice on the water troughs to drink life back into his body. He would sleep then, with huge heartbeats thudding against his chest in the darkness. Those had been the easy nights.

On other nights had he stood shivering, looking in from the cold at a world enchanted by the fire’s glow. Sometimes strangers had been kind. Sometimes he’d barely survived—the ones who took most seemed to hate him most. But he’d endured. He’d lived to beg again. It had always been a choice between the chance at life and a choice that was the absence of choice. Life was monstrous, the young boy had known, but death was the only monster.

These were his earliest memories, woven into the warp and weft of his being. There had never been anything else: neither a mother’s voice nor a place he could have called “home”. There had been nothing before the hunger, save only for the cold.

Bohun shook himself.

_And I survived. I did what I had to—what no one else could have!_

He wiped the fogged breath from the windowpane and grinned out at the mist-shrouded forest.

He no longer feared either cold or hunger. Cold and hunger had been godmother and godfather to him, teaching him to love the only god who had ever protected him: strength. Strength alone let him wrest survival from the iron grasp of a hostile world. The body which had so often been tyrant over his soul now had become his own at last. His reputation was proof of strength, promising violence and retribution—all words that meant “safety”. What was his Cossack fame but a tale of a thousand survivals, each the triumph of a boy who had refused to die?

Bohun had become free. When he was rich, he had lived like a prince. When it was gone, he borrowed until he could raid again. Gold had flowed through his hands like water, like tides, and he had gained and lost a hundred fortunes. He flirted with his fears, showing himself again and again that he could lose all he had and take it back again. In chaos he knew himself. His hand would never again be too weak hold a sword: the lonely child was gone, and Bohun knew with a grateful certainty that he would die before he grew old.

His past was written in blood, his breath was all he owned of the present, and his future was wind through bleached ribs under the Steppe sky. All that he was would drift down into a sea of rippling grass and he would become rooted at last.

That was the life he had been content to lead. Once, it was all he had ever wanted.

Helena had been a glimpse of more.

Helena was a child of those who made their home in the land. The staid, settled wealth of titles and of properties was beyond Bohun’s experience, let alone his comprehension. That was a wealth bought in the slow cycles of seasons with plough, and with sickle, and with the hands that wielded them. Somehow land gave those who possessed it the right to say, “We are different, and you are less than we,” and their power was that they could make it so.

At first, he had hardly understood that he loved her. By the time he did, it was already too late.

Still, Bohun had tried to share his own truths with her, to try to explain what had happened, and why. He wanted her to understand! He tried to prove himself to her. Fame, glory—all were words that meant “safety” in the violent poetry of his heart but were empty ciphers to her. His Cossack name had not been enough, not without a title to go with it, so he had brought her the only thing it was in his power to give, other than his heart and his fame. Surely, he’d thought, _surely_ the wealthy knew how to adore wealth, and respect one who gained it? But somehow all the gold he’d given had become mere metal, signifying nothing.

_“What did you think,” he’d shouted at Zagloba, “that I’m some kind of peasant to take her by force? That I can’t afford a proper wedding in a church in Kiev? I’ll have bells and music, I’ll have three hundred candles burning on the altar, as befits an ataman and a Hetman!”_

Why had Zagloba looked at him like that when Bohun had said those words? Terrified as the old coward had been, there’d been a glint of triumph in his eyes, as though all Bohun’s words had only exposed what he was: a peasant.

_But she was different. They never understood that. She was like me._

He and Helena both stood on the borderlands of their worlds. Alone as they were, they had been closer to each other than to the vibrant heart of the realms to which they were supposed to belong—close enough that, perhaps, if they had stretched out their hands across all that separated them, they might touch.

What had ruined it all?

Bohun shied away from the answer, turning to gnaw at old, dry bones.

That her aunt had betrayed him held no mystery. He had known that so-called “mother” at the last. She had not scrupled to forswear herself when her promise had been made to a mere Cossack. Skrzetuski had cared even less for those promises given to a jumped-up peasant, if he had cared at all.

But Bohun did not care what the Kurcewicz clan or the noble Pan Skrzetuski had thought of him! It was Helena whom he loved, and though the others had struck at honour and reputation, Helena alone held power over his life.

She must have felt her blood superior to his own, Bohun thought, returning to the old lie for comfort. Surely that was it! When Skrzetuski had appeared, a nobleman and a knight, full of the unconscious ease of one who knows his value is seen by all, how could Helena not have been entranced? The instant Bohun had seen him riding by the carriage, Bohun had recognised his heart’s peril.

_That smile. I have never been able to smile like that._

But by then Helena had not loved Bohun. Not for a long while. Long even before Skrzetuski came.

Her heart had been open to love—but not to _his_ love.

It had not always been so, and that knowledge was the beginning of damnation.

Bohun had killed a man in front of her. That was what Helena had told her aunt. Bohun was certain Helena remembered nothing else. He supposed he must be grateful for that, or she might have hated him more.

_Roots and the scent of earth. Helena convulsing against his body, pinned tight beneath him, fingernails digging into his skin, her mouth clotted with his blood._

Sometimes her haunted eyes seemed to reproach him with what had been taken from her, as though her soul remembered what the mind had forgotten. Sometimes he dreamed that she _would_ remember, so she might see how much he loved her. But though he had woven many lies about himself to keep warm, he knew that the day Helena Kurcewiczówna remembered was the day his last hope would die.

Bohun leaned against the window with a groan. She had loved him once, he was sure of it! Even though he was only a Cossack! Was it only the memory of one man’s death that had done this? Perhaps she had not loved him then, but hadn’t she gone with him that day? Hadn't she smiled, and let him take her hand?

_The dappled light of pine shade on her cheek. Her shift clinging to her back in the summer’s heat. Grass staining her hem. Her dark hair burning in the midday sun, and she had let him brush it back behind her ear. He could have kissed her then. Then, he could have kissed her._

There had been no memory of that afternoon left for him when she drove the knife into her side at Bar. It would have been better for them all if she had turned it on him instead.

 _“I give my love where and when I choose!”_ she had said later, beautiful, brave, and hating him. _“That’s my will! That’s my power! And I swear to you that I’ll never love you. Never.”_

And worst of all, her terrible promise: _“I’ll find a way to die.”_

Maybe she had never loved him at all.

Yet deeper than that fear was the thought that something indwelling in him had driven her from him—the things people meant when they said he was wild. But that could not be! Helena was a daughter of the wild Ukraine, he told himself. He had loved her as much for the gentle beauty of her heart as for the steel he’d sensed at her core. She was not born to tamed earth. He would have brought her the world to lay at her feet, but they both _belonged_ here!

_Unless she longed for another world—not for the snarling chaos of the Steppe, but for green, sleepy lands that war had never touched._

Could that be what she had wanted, proud and fierce though she was? How could she give up the dark earth and the unbounded skies? What had she feared here, that she had so longed to leave?

She had feared it enough that she had gone, and her going had ripped out the foundations of his world.

But something had changed. She had come back to this place, as he’d never thought she would. Whatever she had sought elsewhere, she had found it, and somehow that had changed everything.

 _(Freedom._ He groped for the truth, sensing it only dimly in conscious thought. But his heart understood. That knowledge was buried deep, but the roots of all his sorrow had grown around it: _Freedom. She wanted freedom._ Blind and uncomprehending, Bohun loved her all the more for loving what he himself loved. And, for wanting to take that same freedom from her, he hated himself all the more.)

Bohun whispered her name. It was the only thing of hers he had.

_All my loves are a curse to me._

He had never had a past until Rozłogi. And so his monsters would run him to ground here, in the one place he had never truly left.

Hunted. Trapped. Cornered.

_You wanted love? Is this a world to find love in? Will you die for what you’ll never have?_

Bohun slammed his fist against the wall, making the windowpanes rattle.

_I will not die here! Death can take me, but I’ll choose when! Not here!_

Defiance howled through him, stealing all he had left to make itself strong. Weakened, Bohun slumped against the window, his breath coming in shallow whines. He gave himself up to the need to survive, and it ripped every deception he had left from him as it went, exposing the one truth that had kept him alive: _Fight!_

With that truth blazing behind it, Bohun’s soul cried out to the woods, to the wilderness, to the Steppe and beyond.

He was heard.

In haunted ravines, in hollow hills, in vast oceans of rippling grass, he was heard.

 

Seated before the fire, Helena Skrzetuska lowered her embroidery. She listened for the space of one heartbeat—two heartbeats—three.

Something was wrong.

But then she nearly laughed. What was wrong? What wasn’t wrong, with Bohun returned?

The injustice of it flared up, sharp and hot. She had wanted to wait for Jan to come home, but she could not wait, not with Bohun here.

_How dare he? How dare he make me afraid, here in my own home?_

As she rose, she thought of Jan, and what he would think, and how he would worry. But he would understand. He had to.

Bohun had been her great fear, long before the first whispers of war. Long, long before.

Now she would face her fear, and demand to know how he had dared to make her afraid.


	5. And All Your Bridges Burned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fate brings Bohun and Helena together again, though it would have been kinder for it never to have done so. But times have changed: Helena has her own destiny in her hands, and she is not afraid anymore. She will have her answers and she will make him hear her truth, no matter how much it hurts to tell it.

How little it took to shatter a life.

Helena could have told Jan that, even before the rebellion. Her life had been shattered so many times that when war broke out she had felt only a dull horror at the scale of it. Jan and escape were a dream. Helplessness was reality.

Jan had not possessed this same marrow-deep conviction, she learned, and the revelation shocked her.

“It was terrible,” Jan confessed, eyes lowered. It cost him so much to admit so little. He stared at her hands as he cradled them between his own. “The world was falling apart, and all I wanted was to hold even a few of the pieces together. Just a few pieces, if I could.”

“You tried and you succeeded,” she said, “I know you did. You did your duty, Jan as few men could have, even if they’d had the courage to try.”

That was all the comfort he could be given. It was too hard for him to accept more without deflecting it, without speaking of others who had lost more or endured more. Jan was selfless and he was brave, even in pain. Especially in pain.

He’d accepted none of her praise, though he was too kind to deny her. He only bent his head, kissing her hands.

“There was nothing I could do, Halszka. I did everything I could, but every day there was… there was more. And what could I truly do to stop it? _Nothing_.” So much desolation in that one word—it held the death of the young man he’d been.

“I know,” she had said, heart breaking. “I know.”

But his words shifted something in her. Those words came back to her as she’d looked upon the lords who ruled in grand halls or the knights who came to her table as guests. Sometimes she imagined she saw them all from a great height, so that the princes and the lowliest servant-gentry were one body of men, as the laws said they were. And then, with the same strange lucidity, her gaze seemed to turn to their wives and daughters; to the domestics who orbited them; to the hands out in the yard; to Jews and Armenians and Tatars; and to the sunburned peasants bent in the fields.

How much of Jan’s anguish—and that of so many of these brave men whom she loved—had come from the fact that, in civil war, they had suddenly found themselves thrust into a world like her own?

 _You were helpless,_ Helena had never said to her husband. _But at least you can look back on a time when you were not so._

Jan would never hurt her because he was a good man, but she had nearly known a very different life. Not all women had such husbands. Such women could only hope for a kinder life in the world to come. That, at least, was a fate that they had the power to shape: building better lives with each bead of their rosaries. And so they prayed, living on in this world where sometimes one’s only hopes lay in prayers—and those so seldom answered, merciful Father, of all your mysteries surely the greatest: _so_ _seldom!_

Civil war brought that chaos to them all, rich or poor, man or woman, Christian or Jew. That dissolution had scarred the men she loved in their souls.

But some men had been born to chaos.

Helena could not have said why this moment had to be _the_ moment. She had been sitting, sewing, and it seemed she had been waiting for a sign. Then somehow it came, as she’d known it would: silently, imperceptibly, irresistibly, like something whispered through the air or rising up out of earth.

She arose and went to meet her past.

Helena held an earthenware jug of water before her, cradled in a cloth she had embroidered with her own hands. On her left hip she wore Jan’s pistol slung on a belt. As she opened the door, she had thought herself ready.

She had expected a Bohun who was wounded, unable to rise, unable to hurt her.

Instead he was at the window, silhouetted against a backdrop of swirling mist.

Of course he would never do what she had expected. Always, he was the step that gave way beneath her feet.

How had he even gotten to the window? What skin she could see around the bandages was horrifically bruised, and surely worse lay concealed. He shouldn’t have been able to move that leg, let alone rise _._

But, she thought, with acidic self-recrimination, she had been thinking of common men. Perhaps she had even been thinking of a version of Bohun who could have shared some kinship with the feverish wraith she’d seen carried into her home. It had been folly: Bohun asleep held none of the fire that was the truth of his soul.

Jan had said Bohun had not changed, but that was not true. Jan had never truly known Bohun. Bohun had changed, Helena thought: he was somehow _more_ himself. All that terrible, broken-glass beauty had grown so sharp that it hurt to look at him.

As the door opened, Bohun’s head snapped round like a hunted animal’s. And when he saw her…

Their hearts shook as old patterns locked into place around them.

It seemed impossible now that she had forgotten what it was to be seen in his eyes. Always the same hateful blasphemy: forcing her up onto a pedestal to be idolised, with his hand clamped over her mouth lest she shatter his delusions by screaming.

She remembered the first time she'd heard what Bohun had said of her to others. When they were all gathered together, Zagłoba’s reminiscences _would_ return to Bohun, and Wołodyjowski’s moustache would begin to twitch. There was little of Jurko Bohun in Zagłoba’s pantomimes: sing-song rustic accents and comic posturings. But _that_ time she could almost hear the echoes of Bohun's voice: _“I’ve watched over her like she was my own heart, my own soul… never lifted my hand to her… never shook a finger in her face! She never heard one harsh word from me! I went down on my knees before her like she was an icon… did what she wanted of me…”_

An icon! she had thought, swallowing back a hysterical laugh.

Jan had taken her hand under the table, turning the conversation to other things. But even Jan could not protect her from the past.

_“Hey, if only I was a crude, dull—witted animal like you think I am! If I was a peasant! I’d teach you your duty and obedience in the peasant way! I’d write my noble pedigree on your silk-white back with a rawhide whip! I’d have you here right now without any thought of priests, monks, or marriages, you hear me? That’s if I was a peasant, you noble highborn lady. Not a knight and soldier!”_

That had surely been what he believed lay at the heart of his sorrows: _“If I was a peasant…”_

Of all the twisted tragedies of Jurko Bohun, the greatest was that he seemed the victim of some Satanic bargain. He had glory and wealth, but could never buy what he wanted. He was cherished and loved, except by the one he loved.  His eyes were open so he could snarl hatred at each slight or blow, yet he never saw who it was who hurt him most. And, cruelest irony of all, every aberration of his love had helped Helena recognise true love when it came.

Here Bohun was now, in her home. He was pale with weakness, framed against the fog, clad in a white shirt and washed in grey light—all of which should have dimmed him, but he had always burned with his own fell fire _._ It blazed from him now. His whole body strained forward as though drawn towards her by a cord tied taut around his heart. If she’d known in what part of herself Bohun’s obsession rooted, Helena would have hacked it from her flesh with a knife. Once—God pardon her sin—she had nearly succeeded. She had been strong enough for that.

_Helena had set the point of the dagger against her side, hands trembling but firm on the iron hilt. She had looked into his eyes and hurled herself on the marble floor, the weight of her body driving the knife deep._

_From the way Bohun had screamed, it was as if he was the one with steel grating between his ribs._

_He had rolled her over, screaming like the damned soul he was. There had been so much blood that his hands slipped as they fought to pry her slickened fingers from the hilt. But at last his grip closed around the knife as she fought to die. He had taken the choice of her own death from her, and so saved her from damnation._

If you did not look closely, it even looked like love.

But it was only ever about what he had wanted. He had only cared what she wanted insofar as he wanted _her_ to want him.  

What Bohun called love was something that wore love’s raw skin stretched over itself to hide the abomination beneath. It was not love. Helena _knew_ love. She woke to love every morning. It shone from the depths of Jan’s eyes as he smiled at her, constant and unselfish as the sun.

 _"If I am your curse,"_ Bohun had said, _"then you are mine!"_

She was no man’s doom, nor was she an icon. She was herself.

“Things will be clear between us,” Helena said, standing in the doorway.

He said nothing, but his chest rose and fell like a sprinter’s.

“You will not speak to me unless I ask you a question,” she told him, and her voice did not shake, though she clutched the pitcher tighter to hide the trembling of her hands. “Do not move from where you are. My husband is gone for the morning, and he does not know I am here. But I have a pistol and if you stir one inch from where you are, I will shoot you and you will die with my curse following you to Hell.”

Bohun swallowed hard, throat working. Slowly he bowed his head—a painful, jagged movement, like one who fears the reopening of old wounds. Always he would be ungraceful in submission. And his eyes were fathomless as he raised them again to her face.

“How is your leg?” she asked.

“Well enough,” he murmured. “Thank you, princess.” That same musical voice. She had heard it singing for her. She had heard it screaming at her, threatening to throw Jan’s head at her feet.

“Why are you here?”

“I beg… Will you let me ask a question first?”

How softly he spoke.

She was already of half a mind to leave. But, speaking like that, he sounded like the boy she sometimes remembered, though the man he’d become had done his best to murder his memory.

“Please, princess.”

Eyes narrowed, she nodded.

“Will you promise not to tell your husband? I’ll tell _you_ anything, princess, because it’s you! But I won’t— ”

Bitterness twisted her laugh.

“What of my trust is left that you still have coin with which to buy my promises? No, I will make no such promise. Tell me why you are here.”

He was very pale now, dark hair and brows standing out against his ashen face. He answered at once, but haltingly: “I came—I came to see Rozłogi.”

“Rozłogi? You knew we had rebuilt it?”

He gave a violent shake of his head: “No! I hadn’t heard anything or I would never have come here!”

“Why then?”

“I had been here last year. And so I came back again.”

“Last year?” Last year there had been nothing but ruins.

“Yes,” he said, eyes begging her to understand something she neither understood nor cared to. She did not owe him that, not when he had never tried for her. “I had to.”

“What was there for you here?” she demanded, feeling the trespass more keenly than she could have believed. Could he not even leave the ashes of her home in peace? “What, did you ask forgiveness of the spirits of those you murdered?”

“No!” He cried. Now she began to hear the hatred that had so sharpened the lines of his face. “They betrayed me. _You_ never lied, even when you broke my heart.” And then the furies seized him and the _madness_ poured out of him, bending him beneath it as he snarled out: “But you could have been mine, couldn’t you? If they’d not gone back on their word? They swore I was their son, their brother—their _family_. How could they have done that? You’re an orphan, too: you should have understood how that hurt!”

Helena had answers she wanted from him: all the truths she could still see locked behind his eyes. But she had words within herself that she had held back, and they rose within her now like the sea. She had been afraid so long. Once, she had feared even to ask herself what she felt. But time had exposed the bedrock of her own heart, and now she stood with her feet firm upon it.

“If you ask pity because it _wounded_ you when my aunt and cousins did not love you as you wished, you will have none from me!” she said, shaking as a rising tide roiled within her. “They were not… they were not always kind, but they were all the family I had, and Rozłogi the only home I’d ever known. Do you ask pity? You had no pity for me when you took even that little I had from me! You are mad to blame them—to blame Jan, or anyone!—when even if they’d never changed their minds, I _would never have loved you._ ”

Bohun’s lips had gone white. She spoke before he had a chance to interrupt: “Do you not understand,” she asked him, “that you made me feel as though _I_ had caused their deaths? That I could not help but feel the weight of your sins as though they were mine?”

“I am... I never wanted to cause you sorrow,” he said. “Don’t you know that? I’m sorry that you felt such things!”

God, she hated how much even that paltry admission mattered.

But then the rest of it came, as she’d known it would: “I can’t help that I love you, Helena! I never wanted to hurt you, don’t you see? I couldn’t hurt you! Ey, I loved you so much I that I wanted to _run_ from you. I tried! Didn’t I try? I ran, but every path I took bent back round to you, so what could I do? I only wish—”

“How can you imagine your wishes matter,” she whispered, “when my wishes meant less to you than those of the ones you murdered?”

Anger swept through him, profound as the adoration that had shone through only moments before, lending an unhealthy light to his deathly face.

“I had _trusted_ them!” Bohun spat the word like poison. “In loving you, I gave them the shackles they needed to bind me! I trusted them, and but they treated me like a dog! They gave you to that _lach_ of yours, and that was the end of all peace for me!”

“God save you,” Helena whispered, as shock stole the breath from her lungs. She still had the pitcher clutched before her. Somehow she managed to set it down on a wardrobe before it slipped from her shaking hands.

“God save you,” she said again, steadying herself with palms planted on the polished wood. She dragged breath after breath down into her lungs, over and over, until at last the room ceased to spin. Then her nails dug into the wood, her heels hard against the floor, and her voice gaining strength. “Oh—God save you, _you wretch!_ —God grant you mercy—are you defending what you did? They were the only kin I had left,” she cried, rounding on him, “and you murdered them! You would have killed them all, had Yuri and Fedor been there!”

Had a stranger seen that pair they might have imagined some kinship between them: both dark-haired, proud, and glaring.

“They had to die,” Bohun said, with inhuman certainty, “or my heart would have devoured itself! The pain of it—it drove me mad! I would have died, it hurt so much!”

“Better to have died in pain like a man than to become a monster!”

Bohun flinched back, hands braced against the windowframe.

“Do _you_ call me that?” His eyes were wide and blue and beautiful: an ocean of hurt. He had always arrogated all pain to himself, as though he were the only one born to suffering.

“Yes! Monster! A beast could not have done such evil things, and a true man would not have!”

“I never meant to bring you sorrow, princess! Fate was so cruel to us! Ey, wouldn’t I have given anything in the world rather than that? If only—”

“Liar.” The truth in that one word seared her throat like acid. “If only _what?_ If only I would love you? You’d give up anything in the world, so long as it was not giving up what you wanted to have? Do you truly believe these mad lies?”

“Mad?” He shook his head. “If I’m mad, it was loving you that made me so! All—all I wanted was for you to love me back, as I love you!”

“But you don’t love me!” she said, transfixing him with an accusing finger.

Bohun stared at her, appalled. She had questioned the deepest creed of his heart, and all the temples of his faith trembled before such stark heresy.

“You don’t love me, Jurko,” she said, with a voice like Judgement Day. “Understand that. You can say you do with every breath until you die, but it will be a lie, do you understand?”

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. There was anarchy in his eyes.

“If you loved me at all,” she told him, “if you’d _ever_ loved me, you might have cared what I thought. You might have given my wishes a value when weighed against your own. _That_ might have earned my love, once. Do you understand? But you never did. You killed every kind feeling I could have for you. And you did it to yourself.”

He had given her all this power over him, and it had caused her such anguish. Unburdening  herself of it should wound him in just proportion.

“Do you wonder that I hate you?” she asked him

Bohun’s hand clutched at his chest as a man pierced with a lance will claw at the shaft. He bent his head, struggling for breath.

“No,” he said in a deathly rasp. “I don’t wonder at it. But before…” He raised his head again, searching her face. “Don’t you—don’t you  remember how it was before? You didn’t hate me then, did you? ”

Of course she hadn’t hated him. What has there been to hate in the beautiful, fey boy whom her cousins had brought riding out of wilderness? His shoulders had seemed too slight to carry every story that was told of him. But when he smiled, she had known every story was true.

Helena had followed that smile into the breathless shade of a summer afternoon, and she had let him lead her by the hand.

_“I just want to show you,” he’d said, alight with excitement so intense was almost painful. “It could even be our secret place, if you promise not to tell.”_

_She had promised._

_Neither of them could quite meet the other’s eyes without blushing, but neither let go of the other’s hand, though the day was heavy with heat._ _Sometimes his joy burst out of him at a run, and she would trail after him, laughing as she tried to keep pace. Each time he turned back to look at her she caught her breath, as she might at the sight of something wild and lovely she did not wish to startle._

_Through the woods, and on up the hill, with sunlight dappling his arm he led her on. The firs whispered to each other above their heads._

_“Don’t be afraid,” he’d urged her, so fearless that she’d believed there was nothing to fear, so happy that she was happy, too. “I think… I think it’s because you’re special. Because you are. You’re special to me, princess. Come and see.”_

_She hadn’t quite understood, yet still she had been unafraid because he was fearless, and she had known no better._

_But there had been nightmare in his voice when he screamed._

And then… a cold void, and beneath the fear of that emptiness a deeper terror that, if she strove to plumb its depths, she might one day look back upon ignorance as a state of grace.

Now Bohun gazed up at her and dared to ask for the sanctuary of her memories.

“Do I remember?” she demanded, panic sharpening her voice. “Do you know that I don't even remember what happened that day? What is all your talk of madness compared to that? To have to look back in my mind and find only…” She swayed, hands rising before her as if to shield herself. “Oh God, the things I have fought to forget! And to remember! And the beginning of remembering is you on top of me, and—and seeing _what you had done to that man_.”

Helena clutched her arms tight around herself.

“Holy Mother,” she whispered, “I still see his face in my nightmares, even after everything else I've seen! And—and—and do you know, I was so young that I still wasn't sure you hadn't raped me?”

Even when she’d woken in the Devil’s Gorge, she’d had some fear of him to hold her back. She had none left now.

Now he was beginning to understand—to truly understand—and the devastation in his eyes was finally a mirror to her own.

 _“Princess,”_ he whispered. She could barely see his lips move.

“I was terrified! I didn’t even know whether or not… whether to be afraid if there should be a child! Because I didn’t know, and I was too afraid to ask my aunt!”

“No, no!” Pale as a spectre, he held out his arms to her. “That isn't what happened! I never did! I would _never_ —”

“You didn’t,” she cried, “it’s true! So cling to that one shred of decency as if it somehow excused you from all the rest! As if the fact that you would have waited to drag me screaming up to an altar beforehand meant you were a good man!” Her hands curled like claws at her temples as horror after horror crawled in chaos out of her memory. “God, and when my aunt asked if you wanted to marry me you agreed! I knew too well what you were capable of by then, but I still hoped you might have some shred of human compassion! I still hoped you could still be a friend! I had prayed for someone, _somewhere_ to care! ”

“I thought—I thought it would get better when we were married!” he pleaded, and it was monstrous for a murderer to look so like a frightened child. “Helena, what happened that day… I know you don't remember! But I've always known, don't you see? That's why I know you aren't really afraid of me, not really!”

The earth rocked beneath her feet. _The earth caved in above her head._

“You knew?” She clapped her hand to her mouth, holding back a scream—or what threatened to rise from her heaving stomach. “I thought I had lost my mind, _and you knew?”_

“I thought you wanted to forget!” He held out his hands like a supplicant. Always this grotesque parody of worship. “Every time I tried to speak to you, you shied away! So what did I have to hope for, but that you would learn to like me again—to love me!—when we were married?”

“I know!” she cried, “ _Jesus and Mary,_ don’t you think I know that was your hope? But do you know what it was like for me, living like a condemned prisoner, day after day, knowing one day there would be no days left and they'd—they’d force me up to that same altar to marry you, when you were the one person I feared most in the world, and no one would care!” She was choking the words out through her sobs. “No one would care that I'd rather it were a scaffold! And that always would have been my end! Always! Whether you'd murdered my family or not!”

He stared at her, eyes hollow, with madness bleeding in at the corners.

“But you loved me once, didn’t you?” he asked, in a small, forsaken voice. “If… if only a little?”

How piteous the question was, and how pointless.

“No,” she said, with crippled laugh. That was a lie: she had loved him, once upon a time, or hoped to. He could never have understood how monstrous that had made every moment that followed.

Helena felt the weight of the pistol on her hip, and that alone anchored her.  In the end, she knew, it might be the end he wanted—an ending out of song:

“ _Fair and lovely, cruelly she slew him_  
Burying cold lead within his breast  
Dying, his fading eyes yet beheld  
She whom his broken heart loved best.”

When she had longed for death, she’d had no song or poetry to sweeten it. After Bar, she had begged Bohun’s Cossacks to kill her even as they bundled her into the travois: _“Ubiy, kazhe. Ne huby. Spare me the shame.”_

“Love you, Jurko?” Helena asked. “How could I love you?”

He stared at her, open-eyed as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

“The last time you and I parted,” she told him, “I was happy on my wedding day”—he flinched—“and I hoped it meant the world could change, that perhaps even you could. But no, you _are_ my curse. Step by step, you pursue me through every memory that causes me pain: in Devil’s Gorge, in Bar, when you killed my family, when you told me we were to marry, when we were at the barrow—”

She stopped.

Bohun’s eyes were very bright. He had ceased breathing. Only the mist framed in the window behind him stirred.

_On a summer’s day, there had been bright sunshine and cold earth in her throat, closing off her air._

“I had been afraid before you came,” she told him, her whispered voice deafening in that grey, quiet room, “but _you_ taught me despair. I was sorry to make you so sad. I still would have helped you in any way I could, even though I was frightened of you! But then you told me your aunt had given you permission to marry me, I knew all your songs and gifts had been lies. You had not even asked me, because—”

Her voice broke so the last, poisonous unspoken truth came out as ragged and raw as her pain: “You never even asked me what I wanted, _because you did not wish to hear me say ‘no’.”_

Helena wrenched her gaze upwards, her tears coursing hot down her cheeks. It felt like she held back a river with her heart. She gulped in a deep breath, and then another, but she did not break. Tears still blurred her vision when she looked back to Bohun, but they could not stop her when steel and death had not. Her sorrows had taught her strength, and he had not been least among them.

“Why did you come here?” she asked, and asked this time for the answer that would be a the true one. She had to know.

He did not give the same answer as before. Instead he spoke like one compelled: “I came to see your flowers, Helena,” he whispered, offering up this one, barren truth. “I came to see the blossoms in the spring.”

He was not lying. God help him, but he was not lying. Worse than that: in that one moment she saw the far-off glimpse of an innocent boy who had died long before he ever came to Rozłogi. As a girl she’d sometimes caught the flicker of his ghost in an unguarded smile, and she had let herself dream she might bring him back. But the boy who’d taken her into the forest that summer day could never have been saved.

Each of Helena’s words was steel: “How _dare_ you?”

He did not flinch. He was telling the truth, of course—she knew he was. That was more than she could bear. Bohun had robbed her of every innocence that truly mattered. All gentleness had become an act of conscious defiance against the world into which he had so violently thrust her. Trust was something she had rebuilt stone by stone. And now he spoke to her of cherry trees.

“Enough! I’m done with this. You say you did not come here to see me?”

“I didn’t! Why would I lie? But now that I see you again, Helena, I—”

“No, don’t you even try to—to say anything like that! Answer me: did you come here to hurt my husband?”

“ _Skrzetuski?”_ he recoiled at Jan’s name, an animal hatred kindling in his blue-green eyes. “I would—”

“No! No, I don’t want to hear it!” She did not owe him a hearing. She never had.

Helena turned from him, snatching up the pitcher. She’d meant to bring him water, but she’d leave only her tears behind.

“Oh God, princess, please don’t go!” Helena heard his nails scrabbling at the table as he tried to crawl to her. “I swear I never came here to do you harm!”

“And my husband?” she asked, still facing the door. “ _What of the man I love?_ ”

“No! Not even him! But—but—” A hideous groan escaped him. “Oh God, how I hate him!”

Helena rounded on him and the pitcher’s handle shattered in her hand, the fractured ends digging into her palm. The vessel crashed to the floor, slopping her skirts with water.

Bohun tried to rise from the table he sat upon, but she threw out her bloody hand to ward him off.

“Stay back!” she shouted.

“You’re bleeding!”

“What, are you shocked?” Helena snapped, balling up the embroidered linen in her fist to staunch the flow. “You’ve seen my blood before. And do you know what I think?” she asked, in a hard, cold voice. “I think you would have killed me, in the end, when you realised I would never love you. Because you hate me, too, don’t you, Jurko?”

Bohun stared in speechless horror as her blood blossomed across the fabric. One by one each embroidered flower stood out briefly on a field of red before being swallowed by the tide.

“Look!” Helena said, brandishing the cloth, glad to see him shrink before her. “That is what your love has brought me! This is all you have ever brought me: blood and pain! I want you gone!”

Sweat was beading on Bohun’s pallid skin, his eyes fixed upon her. How she loathed this power she held over him. He had forced it upon her, though she had never wanted it. But she would use it, if she must.

“Listen to me now, Jurko. You say you have loved me? Then listen to me now, for once in your life, and listen well: I have prayed for your soul. I have even prayed that I might learn to forgive you. Despite all you did, I have not banished you from my thoughts. But I will put you out of mind forever—I will never speak your name, much less come here to look upon your face again, unless you swear to me now that you will do nothing to cause me further pain.”

“I swear!” His body convulsed as though the words had been ripped from the core of his being.

“How easily you say it!” Helena laughed, and he shivered at that whisper of madness. In his memory, he heard Horpyna’s voice. “But do you know what it is you swear to? To never take me from my place against my will?” She advanced on him with each question flicking out like a lash: “Do you swear to never harm my husband, even be it by inaction? To do nothing to disturb the peace of this place? Would you swear to this: to die before you put your happiness before mine ever again?”

“I—” He was choking, ensorcelled by every nightmare of himself she had shown him.

She had poured out every torment of her soul, and he, wounded, had been powerless to withstand the onslaught. How strange: they had lived this scene already, positions reversed.

“Swear to me!” she cried, grim and implacable as a goddess of marble.

“On my love, Helena!” he cried. They were close enough that if he put out a hand, he could have touched her. “I swear on my love for—”

“Do you swear on something that is a viper to us both?”

“What else do I have?” he begged her.

“Gather together what is left of your precious Cossack honour and what is yet undamned in your soul, and swear by that!” she said, heedless of her tears and his. “Swear by your pride, Jurko, and your wrath, and envy, and lust, and every other sin, because _those_ I know to be constant and true. Then at least you will have called your love by its real name!”

Her last words had been uttered with such force that the air seemed driven from the room. Helena’s chest heaved, but she felt like the flame of Pentecost had swept her up, pouring out words of fire. It had raged through her, and now she was clean.

And her words had seared Bohun to the soul.

Something had cracked open between them. She'd burned down the citadel of the stories he'd built around himself, and now he had to hear her words unfiltered, with each word hammering home in all its full force. _Finally_ , he had heard her. The look on his face made her feel as if she might cry, but it was he who had first forced her into a world where she must feel kindness only fleetingly, and so she let the feeling pass.

She drew nearer still, and he held up his hands, perhaps to hold her back. She extended her arm, the bloody, sopping linen heavy in her grasp, her own blood cooling and sticky against her skin. As if at some silent command, he put out his hand, and she dropped into his open palms.

“Swear,” she bade him.

It did not even seem to be Bohun’s lips that parted, nor his voice that spoke the words: “I swear.”

Without the madness of his love, perhaps there really was nothing left of him.

“Princess?” he asked, in a voice of ashes. “I’m sorry.”

It was too late for that. Far, far too late.

“Swear that you did not come here to harm us.”

“I swear it.”

“Do you swear”—the earth seemed to tremble under her feet, and surely that was what made her voice waver—“that the only reason you are here was… was to see my father’s orchard?”

The cloth between his clenched fingers was warm and wet with blood.

“I did not come for that alone—no, do not misunderstand me!” he cried, seeing her draw back. “I came to Rozłogi to see the flowers, that’s the truth! But I saw it was rebuilt, so what did I do? I never even paused to let my poor horse catch her breath. I rode away!”

“But then you came back again, didn’t you?”

“I wish I hadn’t! I wish I’d had anywhere else to go! I hardly knew where I went! I knew I saw the road to Rozłogi before me, but I thought it was the old Rozłogi! Wouldn’t I have been content to die there? I wanted to! But… but… ey, princess,” he laughed, shocking her, “ don't we have this in common? I wanted to die, but I didn't get my wish.”

“We have nothing in common.”

“We do,” he said, the bloody cloth seeping a fine spider’s web of red across his palms. “We always will.”

She turned from him, her skirts hissing over the floor. Bohun’s face paled in beatific despair: watching her go was as much a part of what they were to each other as the pain. If they had never known love together, they had always shared sorrow.

Bohun flinched as the door slammed, and he pressed a hand to his chest where he’d felt the blow struck. The latch fell into place, sounding a death knell in his heart.

When he could hear no more he leant back against the cold glass, eyes fixed on the doorway through which she’d vanished. He could almost believe he saw her afterimage in the gloom, her white gown inverted to a dark flicker in his vision.

“But you’re the only one,” he told her, though she was not there to hear. “The only one in the whole world.”

Then he bent forward with the bloody cloth clutched to his breast.

Outside the door, Helena sank soundlessly to the floor, a fist pressed hard against her mouth to stifle pain.

_The only one in the whole world._

There had never been any hope of saving him. Death followed him like a shadow. Even had his hands not been steeped in blood, it would have welled up in each place his feet had touched the earth. Even if had he never hurt her, they still would have broken themselves against all the things they could never be.

 _“Helena!”_ She heard her name, and Bohun weeping as though each sob were breaking him open rib by rib.

Helena stopped her breath, crouched there in the dark. But Bohun did not know she was there. He never would have let her hear him sound like that. Helena stayed there in the darkness, both hands clapped over her mouth as she listened to Bohun cry. She was crying too, shaking, caught by fear she’d been to angry to feel and by a relief so overwhelming that it felt like nausea.

“I’m sorry,” Bohun wept, not knowing she could hear. “I only wanted us to be happy.”

The worst thing was, she thought, as she fled, was that he truly believed that. Every moment of fear, every soul who'd perished—all of it had been driven by this.

And, long after she was gone, Bohun’s broken voice spoke to the night: “So I’ve sworn it. I have to go, even if I had not wanted to before! I can’t bear to think that she would hate me more.”

He turned, shivering, to the window. Away in the west, the sun had begun to pierce through mists that the wind had strewn in ragged tatters across the horizon.  

“I hunted her. And she was afraid,” he whispered, pressing his palm to the glass, tears streaming down his face. “ _Maty,_ if I can’t have her, then let me escape my hunter, too.”

The blood-red sun burst out from beneath the clouds, staining the sky with crimson.

“Please,  _maty—_ I don’t want to die.”


End file.
